Hi Pedro,

Thanks for the good words! I'm glad you liked Campsite and I'm sure Micz, the
man who did the design (back in 1999!) is even more pleased. Yes, Campsite is
almost 7 years old. To answer your questions:

> - I need Campsite for a news site, updated every single minute. Do
> you think the program will be up to the job? How the program will handle the
> amount of articles which are inserted in the database everyday, say, three
> years later, with a large archive behind? Have you collected some benchmarks
> about the visits/page views in the media that are using your program?
There are 2 big publications running on Campsite: TOL (www.tol.cz) and Fluter
(www.fluter.de). TOL is running on Campsite since August 2000, so it has a
backlog of 6 years and Campsite is doing well If you check both publications
you'll notice the page load time is less than 4 seconds although they have very
complex templates and big databases.

> - I don't really like the C publisher program running in the back,
> but I've seen there is a full fledged PHP version in the way. So I guess
> previous articles will be preserved in the transition from the old program
> to the new one, isn't it? (I ask just for confirming this point).
Campsite was made almost 7 years ago, at that time we didn't have many
alternatives so we chose to implement the template engine in C++. During the
years it changed a lot, it became multithreaded, templates are cached in memory
for faster output. The PHP should be ready by November 1st, although I don't
think it will be faster than the current version. It will be more scalable
though. Since the version 2.2 all upgrades are automatic and maintain the whole
archive so from this point of view the upgrade is transparent to the user.

> - I tested the program in Debian with no serious problems, but I'm
> planning to hire a dedicated server with an AMD64 cpu, and the only OS
> available in this ISP which takes advantage of this architecture is CentOS
> 4.3. Is there any issue that can prevent the installation in this OS? If
> there's some, I can dismiss the 64bits option and install Debian instead,
> but I'd rather to put the 15-30% plus performance behind Campsite.
Campsite installs on CentOS and on 64 bit versions, the only problems you may
encounter are related to cPanel software, but we managed to make it work with
it too. In case there is a problem installing Campsite we can help.

Regards,
Mugur

--- digitalnegocio@gmail.com wrote:
> Hello! I'm in charge of the future digital edition of an economic newspaper
> based in Spain, and I've been trying to find a good newspaper cms for a
> long, long time. I checked many of them, including the most newspaper
> flavoured Cofax (good, but a Tomcat hell) and Props (really promising, but
> quite limited yet). In fact, I checked Campsite too, but discarded it
> because the 'magazine cms' label which seems to be endorsed to this program.
>
> A good friend encouraged me to give it a try, so I managed to install the
> program and check some of its features. The main conclusion: This is the
> most newspaper oriented application I've ever seen (I love it!). Those who
> have worked in a newsroom and have tried other disappointing
> portal/company/product/shopping CMS will understand what I'm talking about.
>
> Anyway, I have some questions about your program, so I ask for your help:
>
> - I need Campsite for a news site, updated every single minute. Do
> you think the program will be up to the job? How the program will handle the
> amount of articles which are inserted in the database everyday, say, three
> years later, with a large archive behind? Have you collected some benchmarks
> about the visits/page views in the media that are using your program?
>
> - I don't really like the C publisher program running in the back,
> but I've seen there is a full fledged PHP version in the way. So I guess
> previous articles will be preserved in the transition from the old program
> to the new one, isn't it? (I ask just for confirming this point).
>
> - I tested the program in Debian with no serious problems, but I'm
> planning to hire a dedicated server with an AMD64 cpu, and the only OS
> available in this ISP which takes advantage of this architecture is CentOS
> 4.3. Is there any issue that can prevent the installation in this OS? If
> there's some, I can dismiss the 64bits option and install Debian instead,
> but I'd rather to put the 15-30% plus performance behind Campsite.
>
> Thank you!
>
> Pedro


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I do not know much about the Athlon, as I am Intel oriented, but I am
sure the 64 bit architecture does not help much and the 32bit will be ok
for you.
However my experience is, that 1GB of RAM is somethung good for small or
middle size newspaper. If you build machine for bigger newspaper, choose
2GB for the beginning.
I also believe if you would need to increase the performance, good
choice is separating webserver and MySQL server to different machines.

I personaly believe, that the age of 64bit will come in few years, may
be two, may be three.

Today I would probably go to Intel pentiumm D procesor based machine and
fast memory.

Ondra

On Mon, 2006-09-04 at 18:47 +0200, digitalnegocio@gmail.com wrote:
> Thank you very much for your kind and prompt answers, Ondra and Mugur.
> I like FreeBSD. I like the performance of this OS and the clean
> approach in the packages system -and I like it even more now I know it
> includes a Campsite port -. But the ISP does not accept the 64bits
> option in FreeBSD, so do you think FreeBSD 6.1 (32 bits) can work fine
> on this server?
>
> Athlon 64 3000+ CPU
> 1GB RAM
>
> 250 GB HD
>
>
> It is not a terrific machine, and it will have to host both Apache and
> Mysql (BTW, as far as I know there is no cPanel control in the
> server). I would be really glad if Campsite can handle 50.000
> visits/day in the first year of the online newspaper life (being more
> realistic, I guess we will only get 30.000).
>
>
> Your comments, opnions and help in this process (in this media birth)
> will be really appreciated.
>
>
>
> Thanks,
> Pedro

Hardware upgrade will be no problem, as well as a web server/database
separation, in a short or mid term basis.

The number of daily articles (mostly news wires): 50-70
The number of daily pictures: 10-30
The number of weekly features: 5-10

When the database does no fit into memory, I can hire another computer (2GB
RAM) only to handle the database load.

In the other hand, I planned to install:

Apache 1.3
PHP5
Mysql 5

Is this setup ok?

Setup is ok, but why use Apache 1.3? It's older, no improvements and fewer
features than 2.0.

Mugur

--- digitalnegocio@gmail.com wrote:
> Hardware upgrade will be no problem, as well as a web server/database
> separation, in a short or mid term basis.
>
> The number of daily articles (mostly news wires): 50-70
> The number of daily pictures: 10-30
> The number of weekly features: 5-10
>
> When the database does no fit into memory, I can hire another computer (2GB
> RAM) only to handle the database load.
>
> In the other hand, I planned to install:
>
> Apache 1.3
> PHP5
> Mysql 5
>
> Is this setup ok?
>


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Ondra, can you please tell me a good partition map for 250GB server?




2006/8/30, Ondra Koutek :
>
> On Wed, 2006-08-30 at 18:56 +0200, digitalnegocio@gmail.com wrote:
> > - I need Campsite for a news site, updated every single
> > minute. Do you think the program will be up to the job? How the
> > program will handle the amount of articles which are inserted in the
> > database everyday, say, three years later, with a large archive
> > behind? Have you collected some benchmarks about the visits/page views
> > in the media that are using your program?
> TOL has more than 64.000 articles in archive and campsite can handle
> much more. The limit I know about is in hardware and line.
> Thanks to caching of templates the performance is very good and again,
> the load is mostly fixed by upgrading hardware.
> In fact you will need a lot of RAM (more than 2GB) and SQL on separated
> server is recomended too.
> Campsite is fairly scalable so I believe at this point you will be
> satisfied.
>
> > - I don't really like the C publisher program running in the
> > back, but I've seen there is a full fledged PHP version in the way. So
> > I guess previous articles will be preserved in the transition from the
> > old program to the new one, isn't it? (I ask just for confirming this
> > point).
> As far as I know, the database part will remain, the change is only in
> the campsite engine that parse templates.
> So yes, all content you will insert on current version of campsite will
> be possible to upgrade to the PHP version.
>
> > - I tested the program in Debian with no serious problems, but
> > I'm planning to hire a dedicated server with an AMD64 cpu, and the
> > only OS available in this ISP which takes advantage of this
> > architecture is CentOS 4.3. Is there any issue that can prevent the
> > installation in this OS? If there's some, I can dismiss the 64bits
> > option and install Debian instead, but I'd rather to put the 15-30%
> > plus performance behind Campsite.
> we have some ecperience with centos. The changes are not vital, but you
> should prefer dedicated server to some virtual host, because of
> performance. It is also very difficult to make campsite functional in
> environment using cpanel or other administration tools.
> This however schould change with PHP only version of campsite. But it is
> too early for me to confirm.
>
> However only for your information:
> If you plan to run on dedicated server, I would prefer Ubuntu/Debian to
> centos. If you plan using some SAN disk arrays and possible cluster
> solution, you might prefer not to use centos, but buy supported RedHat
> or SuSE linux (depending on the hardware provider)
>
> And also I will make some marketing for my work by recommending
> FreeBSD as very good choice, which is out from enterprise only due to
> bad support for clustering and missing drivers for external disk arrays.
>
> And as a last thing, Dell techsupport recommended me to install VMWARE
> on top of the linux to each server, use VMWARE clustering solution and
> ad guest OS to use whatever you really need, because all hadrware
> support is done through vmware layer and you can easily install virtual
> cluster and if needed simply add new server and expand the cluster or
> move virtual computer to another hardware.
>
> Ondra
>
>

Thanks. I asked because you said that you will increase /var partition
to allow larger space for logs, so I thought the standard freeBSD /var size
would be shorter for Campsite.

2006/10/11, Ondra Koutek :
>
> Hi, there is no reason not to respect standard needs of selected OS. You
> should have enough space for database files (article text), for web
> content (pictures and multimedia attachments) and of course for storing
> logs.
>
> Ondra
>
> digitalnegocio@gmail.com p