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Large-Scale Web Site Infrastructure and Drupal

Issue 197

From Issue #197
September 2010

Nov 01, 2010  By Jerad Bitner and Nate Haug
 in
Setting up a Drupal Web site is pretty simple these days, until it gets popular, then you need to bring out the big guns and start finding and fixing the performance bottlenecks. In this article, we show some of the techniques that can allow your Drupal Web site to scale to the grandiose levels you originally hoped for.
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Grammy.com Numbers

Nathan Haug's picture
Submitted by Nathan Haug (not verified) on Wed, 11/03/2010 - 13:38.

Well since everyone else is throwing their business pitches in here...

The approach described in this article essentially replicates how Lullabot (the authors of this article) scaled grammy.com to 213 million page views within a single day. Most of those over a 6 hour window during the 52nd awards show. In those same 6 hours, we registered 50,000 new user accounts. Amazingly, we couldn't even measure the full potential of the set up because our hosting providers load-testing cluster couldn't send requests fast enough to bring the site down.

Slides and configuration files of this setup were presented at DrupalCamp Colorado.

or you could simply contact

Vish's picture
Submitted by Vish (not verified) on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 10:48.

or you could simply contact an expert drupal support and Maintenance firm like Halosys technologies.

table locks

dalin's picture
Submitted by dalin (not verified) on Tue, 11/02/2010 - 00:48.

keep in mind that converting this table may cause slow-downs on INSERTs, as InnoDB does a full table lock on INSERTs to avoid key duplication.

For this advice to be applicable, the table would need to be undergoing more writes than reads. How many tables are like this? Not many. Watchdog is the only one that I can think of, and if that is seeing that many writes you have bigger problems.

I instead advise changing _all_ tables to InnoDB. This allows you to tune MySQL only for InnoDB, reducing the MyISAM-only buffers to near-zero (the information_schema and mysql databases still use MyISAM, so you can't completely disable it). This also reduces complexity to only be worried about one engine. The only time this does not apply is when the server has limited RAM, as a well-tunned InnoDB server requires more RAM than a well-tuned MyISAM server.

Drupal can scale to millions of page views a day

2bits.com, Inc.'s picture
Submitted by 2bits.com, Inc. (not verified) on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 16:34.

There are many ways to scale Drupal.

At 2bits.com, we prefer simpler ways without added complexity both at the code level and the infrastructure level.

Here is a presentation on 3.4 million page views a day, 92 million page views a month, one server and Drupal.

Mercury

Farang's picture
Submitted by Farang (not verified) on Mon, 11/01/2010 - 14:07.

If you are looking for a high performance Drupal setup then you should also look into project Mercury from http://getpantheon.com/

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