High performance

I've run into what seems to be a problem with memcache. Memcache has a gig of memory and generally sits at around 85% full with over 50% cache misses. The site has been hit with some traffic spikes of around 40k+ visitors per hour (mostly anonymous visits) and this has been enough to take it down (with the additional traffic to another Drupal site running on the same servers). There are two fairly powerful web servers and I think that if memcache were working properly, things would be fine.

Hello,
I am planning on doing some benchmarking to assess two models of CCK used in Drupal 5.

I am working on a new Drupal site and it appears to be pretty well tuned for traffic. There are currently 450,000 nodes that are updated on a weekly basis. I am running into some issues with drupal_execute. The script I have created queries a mysql database for all the information for nodes and loops through using drupal_execute to either create a node if one doesn't exist or update if it finds a match based on a specific CCK ID. I can get through about 40,000 nodes before my server comes to a crawl and starts swapping.

I will be hosting an auction site which will get quite a bit of traffic (expected 2000 viewers) on the day of every auction. Most of the time it will be quite a low traffic. What hosting would I need to accommodate this? What steps should I take to optimize performance. I've looked at media temple, mosso, slicehost and a few others.
Should I go for a cluster, vps or dedicated server.

Thanks.

So I have a drupal 5.x site set up with 1600 nodes, 10 users, a custom theme, and lots of modules.

I just finished setting up a support part for the site where the client is going to be adding an invoice for all the products he sells. He has roughly 5000 buyers and each buyer buys around 2-5 products minimal from him a year.

So lets say I'll be adding roughly 25,000 extra nodes a year to the site for the support section.
In 5-10 years that could reach 250,000 nodes. Is this a lot? Would this slow down my main section on the website?

I am the back-end engineer/architect working on consolidating a number of production web sites using Drupal 5.11 with the Drupal Memcache API as a base along with the multi-site configuration.

Here's the architecture so far...
- 2-node load balancer front-end (2 Cisco ASA 5510s)
- 4-node web/app servers: RHEL 5 + GFS + Drupal Memcache API + Memcached (Quad Xeon, 8GB Ram each)
- 1-node MySQL 5.x database server with two other MySQL servers in hot stand-by mode (Quad Xeon, 16GB Ram each)
- EMC SAN Storage (1.5TB allocated)

I am setting up 2 load balanced servers under 1 ip to run my Drupal sites (multisite installation).
The sites will be using a separate dedicated server for the MySQL databases, on the same rack and 100Mbps network for faster access.
All 3 servers (2 app servers load balanced under one ip and the dedicated mysql server) are on the same physical rack.

Several questions come to mind, in particular...

APPROACH 1: rsync /home directories accross both servers.

forgive my poor English, but i really want to have my problem fixed and join you though i am not a programer.

i use drupal6.6 to convert my origin website , which is a great flux one in my school about 5000IP/day .
i fixed a lot of problems through GOOGLE , tpl.php,form.api,CCK+VIEWS,etc

but i really come up a problem : too slow to do some update after login!

every day , my website will have 50 students and teachers have to update their information like news and so on . they tell me that the new test website(drupal) is great but the performance is too bad.

To make it easier to find information on these matters, I've started the new handbook page Drupal caching, speed and performance in the Tutorials section of drupal.org. It's just a guide to information and tutorials on optimizing Drupal's performance, speed, and scalability, with an initial listing of fourteen resources. If anything is missing, you may edit it to add other useful Drupal performance resources.