High Performance

Hi folks,

Oracle has announced the MySQL 5.5 release candidate. They claim the following performance gain:

• On Windows: up to 1,500 percent performance gains for Read/Write operations, and up to 500 percent gain for Read Only(1).
• On Linux: up to 360 percent performance gain in Read/Write operations and up to 200 percent improvement in Read Only(2).

(1) SysBench benchmark of MySQL 5.5.6 vs. MySQL 5.1.50 performed on Intel x86_64; 4 CPU x 2 Cores/CPU; 3.166 GHz, 8GB RAM; Windows Server 2008.

I'm in charge of 100 plus drupal sites in use by the Purdue University Professional Writing program. We host sites used by instructors teaching multiple courses in PW as well as this Fall introductory composition. Currently, we are using a single multisite install to host all of these sites, with all the courses running off the main code. We're using Storm On Demand hosting, with their intro level server, which is one core on an intel quad core, with 2gb of ram.

Amazon has announced micro instance, which is cheaper. The sluggish apache2 stack may not work well on this limited resource. So I am planning to install drupal on nginx and sqlite, with custom compited lite php.

I am preparing to migrate a site with over 19 million nodes and a 2500 term taxonomy vocabulaty from Drupal 5 to 6. While reading up, I have discovered Pressflow and want to consider it. How do I proceed with the upgrade? Can I use the same strategy that I and others have used to migrate sites from Drupal 5 to 6, copying the database, then replacing the Drupal core files with Pressflow's core files? Or will that create a hopelessly broken site to pick up pieces for?