Place bids/buy now on property listings on a very busy Joomla site

[Skip]

Howdy Folks!

I'm planning a property/deeds for sale site:
Website will have sellers and buyers.
Sellers list properties for sale.
Buyers can place bids on property listings or buy now. Ebay type functions.

Would Fabrik be appropriate to build this on a Joomla based site?
Was also considering hacking up Hot Property or maybe Fabrik can play nice with Hot Property?

Looking for some reference material if it's been discussed or some insight on where to look.

Also curious to know how Fabrik performs on a very busy Joomla site with heavy database usage.

Kind Regards.

 

[cheesegrits]

I wouldn't recommend Fabrik on very busy site. Fabrik is, to say the least, database heavy.

You could probably achieve what you want using Fabrik, but it'd almost certainly drive MySQL to its knees.

You'd probably be better off going with some purpose built app.

-- hugh

 

[rob]

Depends what you call really heavy use Hugh
As with all these things you have a toss up between cutom development which should mean quicker code, or using something like fabrik which may well be slower but will allow you to get going a lot quicker.
Hacking hotproperty is possible, but not fun (i have done stuff on it in the past).
Fabrik would be able to connect into the hotproperty tables especailly if you alter thie config line in /administrator/components/com_fabrik/ from

$fbConf_alter_existing_db_cols = '1';

to

$fbConf_alter_existing_db_cols = '0';

read the notes above this line to understand what it means.

Hugh also to not is that there is a lot of new caching going on in the 2.0 code, the major speed boost I've found is caching to query that fabrik uses to create the table views. We're also making use of Joomlas caching in 2.0, which has increased the speed of fabrik but around 400% compared to the alpha 2.0 that I released previously.

 

[cheesegrits]

I just calls 'em as I sees 'em. For sure, 2.0 is going to be a darn site better. As I've said several times, the main reason I help out with 1.04 is so 2.0 can get released. 1.04 is awesome for small to medium sized sites, but I really wouldn't want to try and do anything too heavy duty with it on a seriously busy site. Especially if it was the main focus of the site, rather than some lesser used ancillary app.

I haven't done any real comparison testing in 1.04, but my gut feeling is that the db usage for a typical Fabrik app would be in the region of 5 times as heavy as a custom built app doing the same thing. Maybe more. And of course it can't be tuned in any meaningful way (just the nature of the beast, not a criticism). If you use certain features (like calculations), I suspect we may be talking an order of magnitude more queries. Which is not a problem for the vast majority of Fabrik apps, where you are probably looking at a few page loads per minute. But when you start talking about multiple page loads per second ... it could bring MySQL to its knees real fast.

But maybe I'm being conservative. I've arrived in Joomla Space via the vBulletin route, where most folk run on overloaded shared servers and get paranoid about every query added to a page load.

-- hugh