# Performance, Scaling, and HA requirements **URL:** \ **Category:** Self-hosting\ **Tags:** hosting\ **Created:** [Março 29, 2017, 12:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/performance-scaling-and-ha-requirements/60098 "2017-03-29T12:49:45Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 1
**Author:** ![mdekkers](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/meta/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mdekkers/32/121115_2.png) [@mdekkers](https://meta.discourse.org/u/mdekkers)\ **Post date:** [Março 29, 2017, 12:49pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/performance-scaling-and-ha-requirements/60098/1 "2017-03-29T12:49:45Z")
Hi all, I am working on upgrading a busy Drupal site with a very active forum. This forum sees about 2 million unique pageviews per month, with peaks to about 3 to 4 million per hour for a few weeks a year. We have about 1500 active forum participants that typically browse logged-in, and we see a few hundred posts per day on average, which can reach thousands per hour during busy times. Despite tons of resources, the site invariable burns to the ground during peak times, which means we restrict forum write access during busy times, which is one of the main culprits, but obviously defeats the purpose somewhat. I am considering moving the forums to Discourse, although the UI might be a bit too advanced for the regular forum audience. As we are on a tight hosting budget, and since we have high peak loads, “how much equipment” is pretty much our first question. I have browsed and searched the forum for similar posts, but have not found too much that aligns with our requirements and expectations. Besides “don’t break when we have traffic” we also have a “load under 1 sec” requirement for anonymous users. For logged in users sub-second load times are desirable, but we’d be happy with under 5. What are the caching considerations we need to look at? do we need to do something else with the docker image? Finally, we are looking at HA - is there a best practice doc I have missed somewhere? are there known best practices for running Discourse in HA? Many thanks --- _[View the full topic](https://meta.discourse.org/t/performance-scaling-and-ha-requirements/60098)._