Performance of EE v CE for a 5,000 sku store with 1m pageviews a month

[benny58]

We have a store with 5,000 skus (and growing, hope to have 10,000 within 3 years) and currently in the region of 1m page views and 10,000 orders per month. We currently work from a bespoke paltform but are considering a move to Magento.

As regards hosting we have been researching it for a while now and Nexcess are our front runner at the moment. The main question we have is, from a purely performance perspective, is the Enterprise Edition worth the money over the Community Edition?

We are considering either a UK SIP 500 Dedicated Server or a UK MCE-SIP 100 2 node cluster. We also see that Nexcess offer Varnish support via thier turpentine extension. If the community edition is deployed correctly and tuned, can it perform as well as EE? 

Any thougths would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

[CreativeWest]

Yes and no. Can CE perform as well as EE, yes but only if you know how to architect it, otherwise no. Full page cache is fine but you have stale content issues and it does not help you with checkout or admin performance. It's a double edged sword. In your case with your volume it technically makes sense to use EE, however, there are licensing issues and other factors. The higher end sites we've been involved with ran on CE but there were specific reasons due to the way the surrouding architecture was designed so the simplest solution was used which was CE. They also did not use full page caching as the stale content was a serious issue in their case. The sites were running on multi-node clusters but cloud based as scalability was important. Yes CE can perform the same as EE but very few know how to do that so if you don't have access to that experience then the simplest is EE.