Can Umbraco handle millions of nodes

Question

I have evaluated umbraco and believe it is a good cms for my project. But there is something really bugging me. When I open the backoffice all the child nodes are displayed for a certain node. What if a child node has millions of nodes. Will all these nodes load in the backoffice? This is the only problem I have with umbraco as my next project will require loading tens of thousand of nodes per day.

Answer 1

This is not a question for SO, you should really ask it on the http://our.umbraco.org site.

However ... You need to look at your architecture - how you plan to implement your project and also how users are going to use the backoffice too. Loading purchase orders, sales orders etc as nodes in the CMS does not make a great deal of sense. After all, Umbraco is a CMS not an ecommerce solution. And navigating 1000s of nodes would be horrible for a backoffice user.

Generally, you should restrict nodes to being related specifically to content. If it isn't content then it shouldn't be a node. There are exceptions, e.g. you could create content categories and date folders as nodes. These are not strictly content but impact how content is displayed.

Products displayed on a site is an interesting one because you could argue that a product is content. But then it depends on how many products you are listing. If you have a catalogue of 10000 product SKUs, yes Umbraco would probably handle it but is this the best use of Umbraco?

The alternative to creating data in nodes is to have separate db tables that hold the relevant data (in this case orders) and then have a custom section within the CMS that provides access to listing/detail/edit screens. This approach is probably much more appropriate when dealing with large volumes of data as you are not putting the load on Umbraco - a custom section essentially by-passes Umbraco and allows you to access data directly from the database in whichever implementation you like (MVC/Web forms).

Finally, I should point out that there are already several ecommerce packages available that will do this for you. See teaCommerce and uCommerce

Updated at 03/2015:

I've just completed an Umbraco ecommerce project using uWebshop (an open-source option). It does create products as nodes and I thought I should probably update this answer. In this circumstance the shop had a very small catalogue (< 50 SKUs) and so having products as nodes didn't pose an massive issue. I could see however that managing a much large catalogue (e.g. 500+) in this manner would become extremely unwieldy.