At DrupalCamp PDX this weekend, I was fortunate enough to have some very interesting (if tantalizingly-brief) discussions with Josh Koenig (joshk), Sam Boyer (sdboyer) and Damien Tournoud around sharing configs and best practices for scaling Drupal sites, especially using Varnish and Pressflow. OK. We’ve talked about it. Now let’s do it!
I see three primary places we might start building on that seed:
Those of you out there running Drupal in large scale environments, let’s start sharing configs and techniques so we can all do better.
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 The site, it is sinking!A large school district wanted to replace their existing outdated static web site with a modern CMS.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!’
Are you going to the Open Source Bridge conference in Portland in June? Hopefully I’ll see you there. I’ve submitted a proposal to talk about what we’re doing here at the OSL to support the Oregon Virtual School District.
Since I run a lot of Drupal and Moodle servers, it’s a good idea to keep up to date on all the published vulnerabilities. I’d really prefer to have some tool that lets me know when a new vulnerability is found, so I don’t have to keep checking back at a bunch of different web sites on the off chance a new vulnerability has been found. Fortunately, the Department of Homeland Security has an excellent site that provides RSS feeds of the vulnerabilities in their database. Handy, but a serious case of information overload since the feeds cover everything in their database.
Hmm. Distinctly suboptimal. Perhaps this is a good time to play with Yahoo Pipes? I’d looked at it before, but had never gotten around to actually building a pipe. This seems like a nice simple thing to try. Continue reading ‘Dabbling with Yahoo Pipes’
