Auth System for a Large Number of Users

I'm being asked to look at technologies to use for a site that could potentially have millions of registered users. Current site has over 500,000.

The actual site itself will only get moderate traffic, perhaps 10-20 thousand visits per day. Database activity from those might only result in a few thousand records being added, plus an activity log, as most visits will be look ups.

Of the registered users, most will only ever visit the site once a year to update their details, and many not even that.

Comments from forum user Kaosweaver indicate that CI won't have any issues at this scale.


My question is about the authentication system. I've used Ion Auth and Community Auth with a few hundred users, but will they happily scale to millions?

Hello Sir !

There should be no problem at all ! But, you should be careful with the server you are running your website.

I mean, I have a table with 2.000.000 records in my website and CI + MySQL handles it just fine... Since user data are stored in MySQL also, you should be OK...

You should use session file or temp handling for the auth system.

Don't forget that database sessions use locking.

What did you Try? What did you Get? What did you Expect?

Joined CodeIgniter Community 2009.  ( Skype: insitfx )

Hello Sir !

There should be no problem at all ! But, you should be careful with the server you are running your website.

I mean, I have a table with 2.000.000 records in my website and CI + MySQL handles it just fine... Since user data are stored in MySQL also, you should be OK...

Thanks for your comments and good to hear that CI & MySQL are handling the load.

You should use session file or temp handling for the auth system.

Don't forget that database sessions use locking.

Thanks InsiteFX. When you say to use session file for the auth system, this is separate to the actual storage of the user's registration details, right?

I've mostly used database storage for session data in ASP.NET Identity, but always used file system based sessions in PHP. I was thinking about changing to database stored sessions for this project, so your reminder about locking has given me something to think about.