Posted by Anonymous on October 25, 2007 at 5:04pm
Hi,
We need our www.projectstars.com site to run a lot faster than it is at the moment and wondered if anyone with experience could advise us on a good option for upgrading from our current virtual server. We're using memcache, block caching, and general drupal caching but as most of the site is dynamic I'm guessing that having a fast database server would help.
Back in 2000 when I was managing Volkswagen's UK cars website development we set them up with one server for Apache web server, one for the application, and two for the database. That provided a nice scalable architecture so that's where I'd like to head towards, although the budget they had was slightly more than we have lol ;)
TIA
Comments
voxel dot net
I know a lot of people and firms that use voxel dot net for some pretty large sites, and all of them give rave reviews. They are definitely on the pricey side though...
Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
ZivTech: Illuminating Technology
Voxel rox!
Voxel is so worth it, their support and knowledge base is top notch. Dreamhost is popular.
Chris Charlton, Author & Drupal Community Leader, Enterprise Level Consultant
I teach you how to build Drupal Themes http://tinyurl.com/theme-drupal and provide add-on software at http://xtnd.us
Server Setup recommendation
dear steve,
projectstars.com is indeed shaping up well. ofcourse, you can try using various caching methods and DB read/write/thread optimizations etc. But for a real business stability and scalability, the following approach is recommended:
Step 1: host the site on a dedicated server
Step 2: Use another dedicated server to host the database
This step can be easily done via control panels:
e.g. In Plesk: Server > Database servers > Add New Database Server
Basic hardware Specs : 2GB+ Ram, Core 2 Duo processor
Estimated Costing: around $150-$200 each
So with this investment, you can rest assured that the site will keep on running like a racing car for (N x 10,000) visitors.
Of course, when you reach (N x 100,000) of visitors you can upgrade the server hardware, or/and add more DB servers.
Hope that helps.
PS: I have not taken any budget contraints into account while recommending the above. Just suggesting the right scale up plan.
Coz, there is only so much far that you can go with shared/VPS hosting...
regards,
Amit
Email: drupalexpertamit@gmail.com
http://drupal.org/node/180555#comment-282392
consider a focus on http
you have a ton of small css and javascript files. you should turn on css aggregation in drupal5. see the performance link on admin page. you should consider using the backport of the javascript aggregation patch which is in Drupal6.
these files seemed to redownloaded on my second request which indicates to me that your http headers are not ideal. you want to have mod_expires enabled on apache. you can do a check with yslow and see what else comes up.
in general, it is premature to talk about buying more hardware until you know what the weakest link is in your current pages. you might have isolated that already, but it didn't mention that in your post.
thanks moshe
Thanks for the tips - I did try turning on the css aggregation but it totally broke the theme! We're hopefully going to be working with a drupal ninja in the next couple of weeks so I'll pass your observations on - I think I'm getting to the limit of my capacity on this - I just like downloading and installing things and hacking them to do what I want them to do and say what I want them to say ;)
css aggregation can be
css aggregation can be pretty bad for themes that use @import in their css. with aggregation this css is imported first and then overridden by other CSS later on, rather than theme css loading last.
Thanks
Thanks for your comments (about the site too!) so far - two servers was what I was thinking of doing to start with.
We're more than happy with our current hosts (etwebhosting) - they answer support tickets very quickly 24/7 and are very knowledgeable but don't specialize in drupal hosting.
I guess it's a never ending thing really - the speed of the hard drives, RAID, etc. can all be bought faster and better, just thought I'd put it out there and see what others had success with. I'll get a quote from our hosts...
Also doesn't help that
Also doesn't help that you've got a 260 kb PNG on the front page... that should be optimized or turned to a JPG... you may want to examine your use of images overall, as I'm just seeing dozens downloaded for your front page alone.
I was wondering when someone would pick that up ;)
Yes, I realise that image doesn't help, but it's only there for a week. I tried creating a jpg but because of the background and browser differences I couldn't get it to stop moving around. One way I thought of was incorporating the image into the background itself then just pushing the rest of the page down so it clears it.
I'll have another go over the weekend.
But. all said, even without any images it needs speeding up - two new servers will help.