Sitecore Content Limitation, best strategy way forward

Question

I just want to understand the best content strategy that we need to employ for future large content sites.

In a scenario the customer is using the Sitecore 7.x for about 4+ years, pure content site, which got rolled out for 10+ countries. Over time the Content authors created as much content as possible and the site performance is in unacceptable limit, with the consideration and limitation of using caching at CD, Load Balance Cache.

As we know this could be the case for many future websites as well. I just want to understand from the architecture perspective and content management perspective, what factors do we need to consider to manage large content and ever growing content.

The below may not be right, but just a thought.

1. Anyway the master / core database can be split ?

2. What archive strategy we can apply to manage such situations?

3. Is sitecore is going to move away from SQL server to No SQL ? to maintain the scale and volume ?

Can anyone share your experience on how did you manage/managing huge content ?

Answer 1

From the experience I have with Sitecore, we have rolled out 70+ sites on sitecore. Below are the following points/practice we usually follow when implementing our sites.

Content Sharing

You may have a main content repository which stores all the common content for the different sites. Contents that are specific to a site are created under the site node.

Content Size

It is preferable to make use of Sitecore buckets to store contents because it is the number of contents which will keep on growing.

Indexing

Make use of Sitecore indexes so that you index the contents and when loaded on the site, instead of performing a call to the database, perform a call to the indexes to retrieve the contents.

Environment Cluster

Breaking the different sites on different cluster may helps in terms of performance. For example, if you have sites found in the Europe, Middle East, Americas, you may have different server clusters such as EU which will hold all Europe Sites, NALA which will hold the different sites in the North ou South of America.

Query

Perform query which does not have to loop through the whole content tree. Example, when using the Axes.GetDescendents(). I saw many times that the item is the root site and when the mention method is used, it loops through all items in the sites. So, you need to try as much as possible to perform a call ti the database which targets the item precisely and also make use of query instead of fast query because fast query is not cache.

Assets

Make use of CDN to load the different assets such as images, JavaScript and CSS.

Server Configuration

As for server configuration, please follow the scalability guide of Sitecore found at the Sitecore knowledge base.