My company plans to use FarmOS to collect data from more than 1,000 farms. In connection with these my questions:
Whether FarmOS (Drupal) supports large amounts of data? For example, hundreds of thousands of records and photos. Will this amount of data affect stability and performance?
How will FarmOS (Drupal) behave if dozens of users work in it at the same time?
I’ve worked on Drupal websites that have hundreds of thousands of records in them and thousands of users. And although I haven’t worked with a farmOS instance that large, it shouldn’t be any different. In many ways farmOS is simpler than typical Drupal websites.
Of course, there may be optimizations we need to make to our own code, that we only stumble upon in real world use, but those can be handled on a case-by-case basis in the farmOS issue queues as they come up. It may also be possible to do some simulated stress testing via automated content creation (eg: with the Devel Generate module).
I encourage anyone who is interested in trying that out to set up a local development instance and give it a go! I’d be curious to hear results.
I recommend you do some research on Drupal performance tuning. There are many ways to optimize your hosting setup for scaling a single Drupal instance.
It’s hard to make broad statements about performance without talking about specific queries. We generally don’t optimize until there is a need for it - and there are many options for doing so when specific requirements are presented, including adding table indexes, caching, etc.
Also, for what it’s worth, farmOS does not use Drupal nodes.