scalability

We operate a personals site with 150K+ members. The current backend is a custom-developed PHP / MySQL application that is not fit for our needs in terms of stability, performance and ability to add additional features. Budget $10k+

We are looking for an experienced Developer who is an expert in PHP, MySQL and Drupal to
(1) Duplicate the feature set of our existing site using Drupal
(2) Write custom modules for features that don't exist in the Drupal Core or a stable add-on module.
(3) Write a custom migration script to port member data and photos from old database

In my never-ending quest to run larger and more complex drupal stacks for more and more users, I'm starting to hit the wall in what I'm able to accomplish with good old Siege, which has been my command-line tool of choice for benchmarking and performance testing for the past couple years. In particular, it breaks down too often in high-load simulations, and doesn't allow for any complex multi-threaded testing, making it very difficult to model near-reality user scenarios like "10 logged in users + 100 anons".

Lately, I've been getting into Jmeter, which has a lot more bells and whistles -- including a GUI! -- and which I think can offer a lot to Drupal developers. However, their basic web test plan barely scratches the surface of what's possible. With the right configuration, jmeter can effectively simulate complete user-behavior patterns like logging in, posting comments, etc.

I'm just getting started, but am curious if people "out there" are already way ahead of me, or if not if folks are interested in seeing the results of my testing work?

As the economic downturn becomes more pronounced and people begin to realize that government alone cannot help solve the problem, there is a growing awareness of the need for community and connection. We are developing a plug-in portal for individuals, groups, and organizations that want to create a better world through direct help to one another. It is an online city-specific community that is part social network and part CMS that connects those that need help with those that want to help.

Overview: Drupal Authenticated User Scalability

I'm new to the High Performance group and I'm interested to find out if people here have run a site with the following stats:

• 4,000 simultaneous visitors, up to 500 who are logged in at once
• approaching 2 million comments
• 200,000 forum posts
• 30,000 registered users

In my never-ending quest for greater Drupal Glory, I've been spending the past year boning up on the various ways to improve site performance and address issues of scalability. Today, doing some noodling with Amazon EC2 instances (and remaining unconvinced about their raw performance as potential master database servers) I had a thought:

What would it take to extend the static node cache in node_load() beyond the individual drupal bootstrap?

Like just about everyone else, I've been loving how much memcached helps speed site performance. It simply rocks, and everyone looking to reduce server load and speed page responses should be looking into it. One of the better things about it is that it can store and return data objects natively, meaning not only are you letting PHP pull something out of a lightning-fast memory cloud, you also don't incur the CPU overhead of having to unserialize() a string into an object or array.

This let me to my thought. If you want a massively scalable interactive drupal site, you need ready access to tons of nodes. Inevitably you will hit the wall with logged-in requests for these from your database. But what if we were able to take the performance boost we get from node_load()'s static cache, and make it work persistently across an entire site, rather than just for one pageload?

Hi All,

I'm using memcache module for cache tables.

Now I am interested in doing some testing of using memcache for sessions.

In production we are using RHEL and CentOS in testing so for setup of memcached I'm using the start-memcached and memcached init scripts offered here:

http://www.dev411.com/wiki/Memcached_startup_files_for_Red_Hat_(RHEL)

This uses a /etc/memcached.conf which looks something like this:

-u apache
-d
-m 32
-l 127.0.0.1
-p 11211

Based on info contained within this thread:

Hi All,

What (if any) best practices are there for achieving a configuration where the cache tables aren't writing to the default DB?

My specific concern is related to http://groups.drupal.org/node/12890 (MySQL Binary Logs of Death). Would like to write the cache mutator statements to a different DB so they aren't included in the binary log.

We're running 6.8. Using APC for opcode cache.

It seems like the options are:

• set different DB/tables in place of cache.inc. Specifics?
• use Cache Router. Specifics?
• use Memcache.

Title: Mid – Principal Web Developer

Location: North Metro Boston

Want to join a growing team developing social media applications used by millions all over the world?

We are working with a global market leader in the mobile space expanding an entertainment & social media division to continue their growth in the Internet/Mobile space competing with iconic brands such as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.

Title: Mid – Principal Web Developer

Location: North Metro Boston

Want to join a growing team developing social media applications used by millions all over the world?

We are working with a global market leader in the mobile space expanding an entertainment & social media division to continue their growth in the Internet/Mobile space competing with iconic brands such as Google, Apple, Facebook, etc.