Tag Archives: MySQL

Website Performance: Pressflow, Varnish, Oh-My!

Executive summary:

We’ve migrated from core Drupal-6 to Pressflow, a back-port of Drupal-7 performance features. Using Pressflow allows us to cache anonymous web-requests (about 77% of our traffic) for 5-minutes and return them right from memory. While this vastly improves the amount of traffic we can handle as well as the speed of anonymous page-loads it does mean that anonymous users may not see new versions of content for at most 5 minutes. Traffic for logged-in users will always continue to flow directly through to Drupal/Pressflow and will always be up-to-the-instant-fresh.

Read on for more details about what has change and where we are at with regard to website performance.

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DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report – Day 2

Here is an overview and some notes from day 2 of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As Ian mentioned in yesterday’s report, day 1 of DrupalCon was mostly focused on the future of Drupal, specifically on the changes and improvements in the upcoming Drupal 7. Today’s sessions dealt much more with the current Drupal release, as well as with version-neutral topics.

Read on for more on the following topics:

  • Drupal deployment strategies
  • The Chaos tools for Drupal module development
  • Drupal in Education
  • Searching with Apache Solr
  • Recent MySQL happenings

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DrupalCon 2010 Trip Report – Day 0

Here is an overview and some notes from the Drupal Scalability and Performance Workshop I attended before the start of the DrupalCon conference that Ian and I are attending in San Francisco. As the title suggests, this workshop was focused on making Drupal (and web-applications in general) run fast. Really fast. I hope to apply the techniques learned in this workshop over the next weeks and months to make our sites run fast enough to handle any traffic load that might be thrown at them, even were an event to occur that would send major public traffic to our sites.

Read on if you are interested in the performance and scalability of Drupal, MySQL databases, and web applications in general.

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