Drupal

Almost every developer know that there is an other Open Source Database Server besides MySQL; her name is PostgreSQL. She is a good option if you are planning a scalable website with high traffic or specific transactions (e.g. e-commerce, large community sites). There are more advantages but my aim here is not a list of "top ten list of ... ".

First - I want to ask why we can't turn on subscriptions here on groups.drupal? We apparently have taxonomy_breadcrumb and a few other "non-core" modules working. We have 64 subscribers, and nobody knows when posts are updated here without coming back each day (which I get few of the 64 do). I think with subscriptions on we'd get a lot more participation.

Ok, enough of that. I would like to know who here is interested in participating in the mock creation of a drupal web site optimized for SEO. What I mean is - let's collectively write a cohesive plan for setting up the most optimized site possible.

So, we have a few modules that we are running for a new client. We're running drupal on about 60K worth of hardware, not including the Oracle database sitting on it's own nice slice of hardware (about 4 tearbytes of data).

So we get data once a week, millions of rows of data (60 million+). The module that we made for the client has a cron job that runs through and makes some updates (this is along with a Database-side PL\SQL script, and a sprinkle of java. A nice orchestra of apps that work beautifully togather). Well, this takes days to do. Literally days, and we noticed a problem when the "aggregator" failed because it through an error trying to read a certain RSS feed. We were not aware of this for about a week. This cost us and our customer prescious time because since aggregator had filed, the clients custom module never got to run!!! Futher more, I concluded that if I put the custom module first, it would eat up all the cron run time. On top of than, we were seriously "under" utilizing our hardware. This was just totally unaccepatble. Thus comes "Mutli-Threaded Cron" runs.

What this does bascially is fire each modules cron run in it's own "sandbox" if you will. So that each modules cron run has the FULL use of PHP's time out, and does not have to worry about another modules cron run failing. The multi-threaded cron also gives more detailed information about each modules cron run. This will better help site admins control the PHP time out variable (which can now also be set dynamically), and see what modules are taking hte most time to run, the least time, and which ones are currently failing.

I believe this is a BIG improvment over the current cron implementation.
Some items I would like to implement next:

• Emailing the admin if these is a "cron run fail" escalation (say in a 20 min. period, there are 10 failure, email me), etc.
• Being able to set each modules individual PHP execution time variable. (be nice to give search.module more time than aggregator module)
• "Throttle" the cron runs. Meaning, I only want to have 5 cron "threads" running at any given time. So it needs to wait until a few have finished before running more cron threads.

You can review the patch and a detailed discussion of it here: http://drupal.org/node/87528
I'll be discussing more options for mutli-threaded cron runs on my blog: http://www.eb3it.com

Below is a snipped from my blog:

So, I have started an ambitous patch. For those who do not want to read the explination, and just gain knowledge by reading the patch:

This group's been around for a while now, and we have 15 members.

I think it's time we try to get together to have a Twin Cities Drupal Meeting.

Since I'm probably as far out of town as anyone on the list, I'm open to suggestions for a meeting place and time. Actually, I'm BEGGING for suggestions for a meeting place and time.

And - anyone want to suggest a topic? David Geilhufe has suggested the possibility that I give a presentation of how CivicSpace on Demand works. So I'll throw that out as a possibility.

Well, I just found about this group (and groups.drupal.org) today, and I've been using Drupal for over a year! I see this group for SEO has 59 subscribers, and yet I hadn't seen any posts from any of you on seo in the main drupal forums. Why is that? If I had seen mention of this before, I would have joined as soon as I found out - and there are questions that people are asking all the time about SEO in the main forums that deserve answers. I've been trying to answer all the ones that I can find.

I posted twice in the last month in the main forums to solicit input regarding an article I wrote on my web site: How to Optimize a Drupal web site for Google and other Search Engine Crawlers. I was surprised to find I didn't get a shred of feedback. The post has been viewed almost 1,200 times on my site and I've not gotten any feedback there either.

Join the drupalgators. Maybe our next contest / poll should be tocome up with a name!!

We are having exponential growth ... up to 5 now and growing .... please join up SW Florida geeks

Might be useful to an interested drupal dev:

Web Programmer

The Georgia Straight is seeking an experienced and innovative Web Programmer to join our Web Department. This individual will take responsibility for programming and implementing custom, web-based database applications on our website. The successful candidate will need to learn and understand the way the current content management system (CMS) functions, so that future programming can tightly integrate with the CMS. Working under the direction of the Web Manager this person will ensure development projects are completed according to established timelines. Using a variety of programming languages and software, the programmer will ensure projects are approached with creativity and professionalism. Experience with Drupal is an asset.