Can Liferay Portal Scale?

Since we work with several different portal products, I’m often asked about the performance of Liferay portal when it comes to scalability.  I think most people who ask this question are under the impression that the big players (IBM, Oracle, Microsoft, Adobe, etc) do scale very well.  Indeed those vendors do spend a good amount of money to ensure their portals are highly scalable.  Also see a post from my colleague Glenn Kline on why you still have to test performance when you customize your portal: Do not Neglect Portal Performance and Load Testing.

But what about open source vendors?  Can they scale too?

Liferay has been publishing performance white papers since version 5.1 came out.  In the latest version, 6.1, Liferay has again performed extensive performance testing to see how scalable their portal is.  Here is a link to that white paper:  Liferay Portal Performance  Note, you will probably need to supply your name and email address to access the white paper.

When you look at Liferay’s performace you will see that it is indeed scalable.  Liferay conducted their tests using the following parameters:

• 1,000,000 total users
• 2,000,000 documents with an average of 100kB per document
• 10,000 sites
• 4,000,000 message forum threads and posts
• 100,000 blog entries and 1,000,000 comments
• 100,000 wiki pages

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According to the white paper, the key findings of the study are:

1. As an infrastructure portal, Liferay Portal can support over 27,000 virtual users on a single server with mean login times under 200ms and maximum throughput of 760+ logins per second

2. Liferay Portal’s document repository easily supports 5,400 virtual users while accessing 2,000,000 documents in the document repository

3. Liferay Portal’s WCM scales to beyond 300,000 virtual users on a single Liferay Portal server with average transaction times under 50ms and 35% cPu utilization

4. In collaboration and social networking scenarios, each physical server supports over 6000 virtual concurrent users at average transaction times of under 800ms

5. Given sufficient database resources and efficient load balancing, Liferay Portal can scale linearly as one adds additional servers to a cluster

These results are for Liferay 6.1 Enterprise Edition and don’t take into account custom applications deployed on portal.  So even though you can see that Liferay is scalable, make sure you test performance of your own applications written for Liferay.