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Hosting Server Requirements and Settings
What configuration should my hosting server have to support iWiccle/Wiccle?
Any modern web server software configuration supporting PHP 5.2.x (or 5.1.x with a slight modification), MySQL 5 and Apache 1.3 / 2.0 (or IIS/some other webservers with Smart URL and possibly other as of yet unknown limitations) is sufficient for running iWiccle. For image processing features, you need to have GD1/GD2 image library support in your PHP. All of the above represent a very general server configuration you should expect from your average decent hosting company in most situations.
There are very few settings that need to be changed to support iWiccle/Wiccle, and some of them are optional. The only critical setting you need to be able to change is the PHP value register_globals, which interferes with some system functions when left on.
If you wish to use some Wiccle Web Builder modules (such as live chat and on-server video conversions), you will need a VPS or a dedicated server. If these two modules are not in use, everything will work just the same on a standard shared hosting account. You can read more about this at the download page.
If you use the Gallery module or allow image uploading, your PHP memory settings and hosting plan RAM limits / PHP upload size limits may prevent images above a certain size to be uploaded. This factor is independent of our software, and the amount of memory used is directly tied with PHP image processing classes. Also see: Image resolutions, memory usage and PHP memory/upload directives
Resource Usage and Recommended Server Resources
What kind of hosting plan do I require? How much memory, space etc. should a VPS hosting plan have? How much resources do iWiccle/Wiccle take?
The server requirements depend totally on the volume of your traffic, and the amount and nature of content you have available per page, in particular on your most popular pages.
On our main demo server, different iWiccle build 1.20 page configurations take anywhere between 1.2 MB to 3.5 MB (or peak 5.5 MB on my local Windows server where PHP seems more hungry) to load, and parse in anywhere between 0.05 seconds and 0.35 seconds on a busy day and a rich content combo. (iWiccle default front page with 10 different modules simultaneously enveloping in live data would be a good example of a page responsible for consuming a bit more resources.) Our old demo upgraded to 1.20 on my personal VPS gives figures in the same range.
If you do a quick math with averages from the above (3 MB / 0.25 sec for example), then a VPS with 512 MB of RAM available would be able to support a theoretical maximum of 170 simultaneous iWiccle 1.20 users loading a page every 0.25 seconds, or 780 simultaneous users in a second, if only the CPU could keep up with it. (Which is unlikely — and at such massive volumes you should really have a high-end Hybrid server or a dedicated server if you want any software to keep up with the level of incoming requests.) That gives you an idea of the general range of resource usage we're looking at.
If you want your site to perform well, be sure that you don't sign up with a super-cheap host that unreasonably oversells (allocates far too many customers per server, assuming no-one uses anywhere near full capacity) or otherwise crams their VPS servers, as your CPU share will likely get smaller in proportion to users on server, unless it's a "guaranteed CPU time" plan (which you should also check for).
CPU usage is a bit harder to project in advance than RAM usage, so make sure your VPS can be scaled up when necessary if the traffic on your site suddenly peaks, or if you plug in more complex extensions that require more processing power.
The upcoming intelligent dynamic cache will cut down the required processing time down a great deal, bringing your site CPU and Memory usage down to an estimated 10%-25% of the current system that parses live data, applicable for every page load of all combinations of user front-end content (that makes up the bulk of your traffic).
Our objective is to have the page load averages down to under 1 MB of memory and under 0.10 seconds of CPU time for an average page load with the multi-level cache switched on, in average mid-range hosting environments ($20 upwards / month grade hosting). With that on the table and rolling in the coming months, there will be little need for anyone to ask questions about iWiccle/Wiccle resource usage ever again.
