Technical Background of the BLC

We have 31,637 labels shown by 39,420 pictures (JPG) that takes 3,07GB of data. They are assigned to 4,415 brands and are very well organized in 7,020 catalog entries ("catalog pages") to separate the sets. One important aspect is to maintain the common catalog in our group of collectors and to offer labels for exchange. In other terms: cooperation and interaction. That means, we need a fast computer and a professional content management system. This month 62GB of data was transferred from the catalog to the computer screens of our collectors. In average we have 75 sessions a day, of collectors using the catalog.

We decided to implement the catalog with the help of the content management system DRUPAL. Drupal is an open source software and we not need to pay for any licences. Drupal has got many functions (modules) but our catalog needed some additional programming. For example the prefilled catalog entries when adding a new label or the filter of the 'Wantlist', where you can select a banana label in the tradelist of a specific collector. To implement this and give me some advice in how to build up the website in general I asked a company and payed about 1,600€ to help.

The current Drupal version is 7.67 and requires PHP 7.20.20 and a MySQL 5.5 Database,  jQuery 1.4.4 and the Imagemagick for PDF images of version 6.8.9-9 (Flipbooks). The structure of the labels (catalog entries), search indexes and all other information requries a database with at the moment of 1,034.88MB. In addition we have 142.107 files including the mentioned JPGs with in total 10.22GB of disc space. Because of the many modules it needs 16GB RAM. We are using a dedicated Server L-16 HDD managed. Managed, because I do not have the technical experience and fun to fix any problems or restart components in the technical environment. So this is managed by 1&1 in Germany. Intel Xeon E3-1230 v6. 4 Cores (HT) x 3,5GHz. Unlimited traffic.

This evironment cost 50€ plus 10€ to manange it a month. So we are talking about 720€ each year. It is so far not solved how to cover this cost in our group of collectors

Author: 

michael

Last modified: 

Aug 2019