Trying to get our arms around how to load test CiviCRM and it is turning out to be a major issue with quite a few steps. This post is primarily for us to sort things out and make sure we are on the right path. So here are the specific steps and various programs we'll use to test things out:
Blogs
Wikipedia Fundraising C.O.R.E designed and developed by the folks at Four Kitchen Studios is using CiviCRM v1.5 and Drupal 4.7. In their own words:
Just to set better context, here is our load testing scenario:
Last weekend Rupam Jaiswal, our CiviCRM team developer from India got married. A few of us from the team had gone for the wedding. It was great to see the transition from a developer whose days revolved around putting together code, into a bride who was now busy getting things together for the big day. She looked resplendent in her traditional Indian outfit.
One of our major goals for this year is to optimize CiviCRM to handle load in a graceful manner. This is extremely important for us with the Branner Project.
One of the most frequently asked questions on the CiviCRM dev list is for help with installing CiviCRM. Most of the questions are quite similar, although each of them seems to have their own specific twist. We do agree that installing CiviCRM is not for the faint-hearted and it takes a fair amount of skill to get it up and running the first time.
CiviMail, described in general previously, is our component for mass-mailing the CiviCRM contacts. In this entry, we’d like to get a bit more into the details on how CiviMail exactly works ‘under the hood’.
Recipients List Building
Don't worry, the body is not as dire as the subject indicates. Just wanted to give folks some background about how we operate and manage to do what we do, and what we need to do to continue delivering an awesome product (or so we think ...)
We currently are spread across India (9 developers), Poland (1.5 developers), US (dave) and NZ (lobo).
Now that 1.6 beta has been released - it's time to look ahead and prioritize the NEXT release (1.7).
There are a few "big features" we're targeting:
CiviEvent (specifications) CiviReport (blog thread) Duplicate contacts: "find" and "merge"... and a number of smaller but significant feature candidates.
As some of you are aware our development team is fairly distributed. We have developers in Mumbai - India, Warsaw - Poland and San Francisco - US. Effective next week, we will have a presence in Nelson - New Zealand. I'm moving to NZ for 9 months and am looking forward to it. You could follow our adventures on my newly created personal blog. If there are any CiviCRM'ers / Drupal'ers in the Nelson area, would be great to form a co-working space, join forces and spread the open source paradigm with organizations in that area.
Dave Greenberg will also be on vacation for a large part of December. We are pretty confident that the rest of the team will do a great job of keeping the project and community moving forward at our normal blistering pace. Feel free to keep them busy and on their toes with a constant supply of feature requests, bug reports and installation issues :)