Hi Buck,

Have purchased and installed the newest version of Business Directory and XMod.  I love it's functionality, and it does more than I'd hoped to find in an affordable Directory Module.  Love it!!!

I wanted to find out what kind of scallability I can reasonably expect out of the module.  Can it support 200 entries, 2,000 entries, 20,000 entries???  At what point will performance and searchability be impacted.

I need to know because a certain prospective client is interested in supporting a potentially large number of listings.  If I implement a BD solution, I need to know what kind of volume of entries they can expect to support.

Thanks in advance for your help,
-Glenn

Hi Glenn,

Since Business Directory is built on the powerful XMod engine, the Xmod data is stored in a SQL database and formated as XML.

Since the release of XMod 4, indexing has been added that greatly increased the scalability of XMod.

Fellow XMod MVP, Midspot, has reported, "As far as scalability, I have seen reports of users with 100k records plus without any limitations as long as there is sufficient hardware underneath."

Buck

I am posting to this thread because my question also has to do with scalability, but scalability of categories and sub-categories rather than scalability of records in the database.

Will a large number of categories and sub-categories impact performance? I haven't come up with actual numbers yet and would hope to be able to keep it under control, but an example would be a typical yellow pages directory. There could be many many categories with quite a few sug-categories for each.

I would expect performance to suffer at some point, but do you have any idea where it becomes a noticable drag to page load times.

Thanks,
Ed

Just as a side-note, it would sure be nice if Categories and Sub-Categories could be entered in a more convenient way, such as an imput form, rather than editing form code for each change. This would allow data entry folks to make additions without worrying about them screwing up the form.

Hi Ed,

The sub categories are JavaScript and should be fast load.

Gary at http://mygumbopot.com/ is using a considerable amount of categories with success on shared hosting.

My sites, although hosted on dedicated servers, show no scaling issues.

Of course, it always depends on the server and network connection resources you have available to you.

In regards to your side note:

The built in categories in Xmod are not what I was looking for in my applications. If you enter a category it is shared between all Xmod applications that you have on your portal. If you were using Business Directory, Move My Inventory, and Review IT on the same portal, you can see where that would cause real issues.

I have made a suggestion to the Xmod development team to have the categories isolated to each XMod instance on a portal. That change would allow the managing of categories through the Xmod action menu. I hope to see it implemented in Xmod 6.

There was no built in ability to associate sub categories with categories in Xmod. That is why I wrote the javaScript routine to handle this functionality.

Note: As I have mentioned in the documentation, it is very important to have your category and sub categories set up prior to adding listings.

If you are linking to categories through dashboard links, you could break links by renaming or removing categories and sub categories.

Buck

 Hi Ed,

I will bring the subject of sub categories up in my conversations with Kelly.

You can add additional category and sub category names to Business Directory without any issue.

If Xmod 6 does addresses sub categories, I will need to create a new version of Business Directory to meet the requirements of the new code.

Buck