Staying online during a perfect storm of traffic

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juan_g's picture

As seen on Planet Drupal, the recent article Improving Drupal's Performance with the Boost Module for the UN's Millennium Campaign (October 23rd, 2008) describes how a Drupal site successfully managed a very high traffic situation. They achieved this with "one enormously helpful Drupal module, called Boost", and "some fine tuning".

Comments

Very nice write up!

Jamie Holly's picture

This is one of the things I love about the Drupal community - the openness and sharing of recipes for achieving high performance.


HollyIT - Grab the Netbeans Drupal Development Tool at GitHub.

Additional articles, and new Boost 6.x branch

juan_g's picture

Other interesting performance-related articles on that international event: United Nations Uses Drupal for Huge Anti-Poverty Event, and Putting Anti-Poverty Activists on the Map. See also United Nations using Drupal, by Drupal founder Dries Buytaert.

BTW, Boost's 6.x branch has been started yesterday by Arto Bendiken and Ben Lavender, releasing 6.x-1.0-alpha1 (and 6.x-1.x-dev). (Still needing a patch for locale and multilanguage sites).

For more Drupal caching modules, see Modules: Performance and Scalability. As they mention in the comments of the other article, caching can be very useful as well for smaller sites on shared servers. I think the need for migration to a dedicated server can be avoided or delayed in many of those cases, just by caching to reduce server load. For example, when using Boost, achieving near static performance when traffic is mostly non-logged in visitors.

Also really interesting are many other strategies in this High Performance group, such as Intoxination's recent one, for instance.