high performance

I have a site that will be heavily used in only six or eight states but they are on different sides of the continental US. I found a really fast host on the east coast with super service, etc, but whenever there is heavy network traffic, it is dog slow on the west coast. I imagine the opposite is true. I found this by doing a tracert and seeing that the big delay was in the middle of the country.

Does anyone have any thoughts or advice on how to select a host for best performance in this case? It is truly a conundrum.

Trellon recently released the Xapian search module for Drupal. This replaces Drupal's standard search feature seamlessly (except for a core patch) with an interface to the Xapian search engine. There's a post about it over on Trellon.com.

This article I wrote should appeal to people interested in high performance Drupal sites. Most of the performance gains are achieved by doing things with the Javascript and Drupal's File API.

http://wimleers.com/article/improving-drupals-page-loading-performance

You can expect another article soon, about the same topic, but then putting it to practice. I'll use the CDN integration module (of which I'm also the maintainer) and the included core patches to do it in just a few simple steps.

I'm assuming it's too late, but if not here's an easy performance win for D6:

http://drupal.org/node/215080

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blockquote>The type column of the {system} table is currently a varchar(255) field. Yet in 99% of all Drupal installations it stores either the text 'module' or the text 'theme' and nothing else. This is already a strong case for making it an int column and defining constants for module and theme. Then, on every page, there is this query:
SELECT filename FROM system WHERE name = 'user' AND type = 'module';

Trellon is announcing multiple vacancies, effective immediately. Please send resumes including cover letters and salary requirements to jobs@trellon.com. No phone calls please.

Position Title: Technical Lead
Reports To: Director of Development
Term: Permanent, Full Time
Classification: Professional, technical
Travel Involved: Infrequent
Salary: $70,000 - $120,000 / annual
Location: Telecommute