Is Sakai scalable?
Is Sakai scalable?
Sakai is highly scalable.
Expansion of capacity is often a matter of adding nodes to load balanced configuration. Achieving an initial configuration for scalability is non-trivial, but once this infrastructure is in place, adding capacity does not require a huge amount of labor or a large amount of system downtime. Adding horizontal capacity at the application layer often involves little more than duplicating an existing node onto an additional unit of hardware and updating load balancer configuration to make use of the new node.
Database performance scaling is typically considered to be outside the scope of the Sakai application itself, in that Sakai presents the deploying institution a choice of RDBMS (typically, MySQL or Oracle), and standard database management and scaling approaches apply.
The University of Indiana Sakai deployment (locally called "OnCourse") reported in 2006 supporting a population of 112,341 active users, exercising 65,321 sites (sites include courses and non-course collaboration groups in Sakai), with 73,955 page views per day and successfully supporting a ceiling of 22,000 concurrent user sessions, with an average of 5000 concurrent sessions.
The University of Michigan Sakai deployment (locally called "CTools") routinely supports weekly peak usages exceeding 5,600 simultaneous users, with more than 45,000 unique users accessing CTools in a typical month. These are by no means the extremities of what can be achieved with Sakai scaling, but is offered here as another example of a significant established production Sakai usage.
Not only is Sakai expandable and scalable, it has been demonstrated to scale in production situations and at this very moment there are successful production deployments of Sakai scaled to support over a hundred thousand learners.
Note that these are not only large deployments of Sakai that have scaled: they are active deployments of Sakai making use of significant, collaborative, read-write tool functionality while also scaling. Sakai has demonstrated scalability while continuing to deliver its rich toolset.
