Proposal for MySQL conference April 20-23, 2009 Santa Clara, CA, USA

David Stauss and I submitted the following presentation.

Websites are increasingly adding interactivity and social features. In this session, Kieran Lal will review common features for social publishing applications such as voting, social networking, blocking spammers, and dynamic display of aggregate activity. David Strauss will then review the popular social publishing platform Drupal and indicate how scalability patterns for social publishing applications have been applied to Drupal and other AMP-based sites. He will review how to analyze communication topologies between components such as search, logging, and content creation and how to apply the analysis to improving performance, scalability, and reliability. Specifically, David will review best practices and challenges for using MySQL's single-master replication model and explain why the MySQL master server is often the most important bottleneck in large-scale, interactive applications – and how to handle that limitation architecturally.

The presentation will feature case studies of large-scale AMP-based sites, including several Drupal-based ones. We will break their architectures into components, map out communication topologies, and consider opportunities to optimize and reduce MySQL's workload. From these studies, common architectural patterns will emerge. David will share his insights working on these models, which have allowed Wikipedia, The Internet Archive, and other high-traffic media sites to run with unprecedented scale and cost savings on free, open-source software.

Technologies discussed in the presentation: MySQL, PHP, Linux, Apache, Solr, Xapian, memcached, Squid, Varnish, MyISAM, and InnoDB.
Bios

David Strauss is a systems architect specializing in highly available, large-scale Drupal systems for social networking and media sites. He is a member of the Drupal.org infrastructure team and a founder of "Four Kitchens":http://fourkitchens.com/, a comprehensive digital services firm headquartered in Austin, Texas. Four Kitchens provides consulting, development, infrastructure, and web strategy services to the Wikimedia Foundation, the Internet Archive, Creative Commons, NowPublic, Mansueto Ventures, Stratfor, and Lifetime TV.

http://files.fourkitchens.com/david.jpg

Kieran earned his nickname, Amazon, by following a dream that he was biking through the Amazon river basin. That spirit of adventure
continues in his multiple roles within the Drupal community today. Kieran works on drupal.org infrastructure, fund raising, test
automation, performance documentation, marketing, event organizing, and community trouble shooting. Kieran is the Drupal community adventure guide for Acquia.

Drupal community adventure guide, Acquia Inc.
Drupal events, Drupal.org redesign