Yet another newspaper site on Drupal

Posted by onaz on October 10, 2007 at 4:01pm

Hi all,

Today was the big launch date of a new newspaper publication in Finland, uusisuomi.fi. The site is a free commercial online news paper. We started this project four months ago and have been extremely busy putting it together ever since. Anyway, the first and hopefully worst part is over as the site is up and running. I hope we can contribute to this group by posting a small how-uusisuomi.fi-put-it-together some day.
Some startup stats (after being online for 7 hours):
- Server hardware: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5, 2* quad-core Xeon CPUs (so altogether eight cores), 2GB RAM (upgrade to 4GB ordered to survive a small slashdotting), a nice bunch of RAID storage space
- Almost no launch problems (a couple of short HTTP500s during the highest visitor peak when FastCGI ..umm ..didn't cooperate).
- 2500+ registered users (as said, in seven hours)
- Peak HTTP session count ~3000 one hour after launch
- 40000+ front page loads
- 250000+ page loads

no content caching (Zend Platform & Drupal core caching does not work with our environment), even for anonymous users
self-made javascript caching (speeds up page-loads a bunch)
a few home-made modules (automatic news import via XML, special node&view rendering functions)

Tonight's feelings: tired, but happy. :-)

uusisuomi.fi

Comments

Hyvä!

Posted by itangalo on October 10, 2007 at 9:40pm

Nice looking site! Congratulations!
I'm particularly impressed by the monstrous amount of registered users. How did you do THAT?
Looking forward to reading more details - not least the parts about news import via XML.

Again: Congratulations. Well done.

//Johan Falk, Sweden

Well done

Posted by afox on October 11, 2007 at 5:49am

Excellent work! Looks very sleek and nice. I'm really looking forward to know the details behind the project.

Very nice indeed...

FastCGI

Posted by yelvington on October 16, 2007 at 2:39am

Congratulations!

Joonas, can you explain your choice of FastCGI rather than the Apache module version of PHP?

And are you using a PHP bytecode cache? (Is that possible with FastCGI?)

FastCGI

Posted by Garrett Albright on October 16, 2007 at 4:37pm

I'm not the original poster, but allow me to address questions about FastCGI. There are two major advantages to using PHP (and other scripting languages) with FastCGI. One is that you don't have to use Apache, and can instead opt for alternatives which may work better for your situation such as my personal fave, Lighttpd. Secondly, should the PHP interpreter go down in flames hard, the web server is not affected at all since PHP and the server are separate processes according to the operating system with as much distance between them as feasible. This also means you can rebuild and upgrade the web server and the interpreter separately.

The Boise Drupal Guy!