It all started with an itch. It was a really painful itch that involved a Drupal site that was essentially down due to load. I scratched it with the help of a few incredibly helpful blog posts I found, so now it’s my turn to add to them so someone else can benefit as well.

The Problem:

HALP! The site, it is sinking!

A large school district wanted to replace their existing outdated static web site with a modern CMS. They chose Drupal as their platform. The new site was successful.

Too successful.

The average traffic of 5 hits/sec jumped to over 100 hits/sec and the server went into a swap death spiral.

Fear not! Help is on the way in to form of a couple of technological superheroes …

Pressflow and Varnish to the rescue!

The mutually-complimentary combination of these two tools can vastly increase the number of users your site can serve. Here’s the what, why, and how:
Continue reading ‘Pressflow, Varnish and Caching … oh my!’