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New here and a few months ago we start working with Civi for a small project but now we are planning to use it for a project with a over 300.000 contacts and 40+ users. I would like some help and suggestions :

  • What is the ideal Civi setup for a large project like this ?
  • Shoud we use wordpress or drupal ?
  • Local or Cloud hosting ?

Thank you in advance.

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  • Those are some pretty wide open questions with subjective answers. Ultimately more resources are always better for big datasets in any environment. That can be done with any of the choices you offer. This forum is typically for questions that have clear answers. I'm afraid there are no definitive answers for these questions.
    – kapn
    Commented Feb 10, 2021 at 19:15
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    The number of contacts do not necessarily have the most impact on performance, other tasks (e.g. complex smart groups) may be more of an issue. That being said, we would probably use a server with 4-8 GB of RAM and 2-8 cores (as kapn said, more is better) and it should definitely have an SSD and not an HD. WP or Drupal probably would not make a lot of difference.
    – Fabian
    Commented Feb 11, 2021 at 7:54

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As others point out, there are no clear answers. The number of simultaneous users is also an important factor. But here are some tips from my administration of a similarly-sized database:

  • I run everything on a 4GB server. This is usually sufficient, but when my client had a very high-traffic event, I saw some monitoring warnings (though I couldn't detect slowdown in manual testing). If you're eligible for Microsoft Azure free hosting credits, you can get an 8GB server and not worry*.
  • Local vs. cloud doesn't affect performance. If "local" implies "not accessible to the Internet" that will mean you lose some features though.
  • Install Redis. I have it on my live site but not my dev site and the difference is noticeable.
  • Tweak your MySQL settings to give as much InnoDB cache as you can spare.

* As Alan points out in the comments, there are many political reasons to not host with Microsoft; data privacy issues, jurisdiction and a willingness of your host to fight for your rights are all important.

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    I agree that memcached (or redis) makes a big difference to the admin and authenticated user experience, I'd always recommend it. I would assume that you'll want to replace your server about every 3 years for various reasons (i.e. include that assumption in your planning, even if you don't actually do it). I also think that hosting is a political choice, especially these days.
    – Alan Dixon
    Commented Feb 16, 2021 at 19:17

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