- database load of users, and notification of new password via email. this should be easy
- "3) Allows people to search for users". Again, this is a straightforward enhancement. I'm willing to code it in a hurry if there is interest from HQ in using it.
How do you think drupal will do scaling to 500,000 users? To me, this is the biggest challenge of this system. Even 50,000 is a lot.
cheers -josh
I think Drupal will handle that fine.
The usual challenge with a CMS is with very heavy load, not with too many records (i.e. users) in a given table. If we had 500,000 concurrent users, that would be a challenge. However, Drupal's caching system has been demonstrated to scale against a Slashdotting (a large, sudden traffic spike).
I think your scaling question may be "if i search for everyone in the '021' zip code, can i get a result in under 5 seconds". The answer to that is yes. All you need are the right indexes. This is easily fixed if, for some reason, Drupal doesn't come out of the box with proper indexes. This work required to get this to happen is identical whether you use Drupal or a homegrown solution. Drupal has a single users table. Not hard to optimize.
