Trellon sponsored session: Making Drupal Scale: How Earth Day Handled 80 Million Hits in 2 Days
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Trellon sponsored session: Making Drupal Scale: How Earth Day Handled 80 Million Hits in 2 Days
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The Trellon team will present a case study of scalability and performance in Drupal, explaining the specific techniques our team used to handle massive spikes in traffic on short notice. For background, a case study about the project is available at http://www.trellon.com/project/earth-day-network. This site was unique, in that it was supporting a personalized web site with geocoded content, iPhone application and Facebook application. All of these components became extremely popular all at once, with links to the site coming in from the front page of Google and the iPhone app store. We did not expect anywhere near 80 million people to come that day trying to save the Earth, but we did do our part to make sure they could all connect through this dynamic environment.
This session covers the specific steps we took to keep the site working under massive load and make sure that page requests were being handled in an average of 1.2 seconds for authenticated users. You will learn about the following items during this session: 1. How the server and application was initially configured 2. What happened when Google starting pushing traffic our way 3. Limitations of pressflow, varnish and memcached that we ran into, and how we addressed them 4. What we did and did not patch in Drupal to keep the site moving 5. How we got Drupal down to fewer than 20 database queries per page load 6. Our caching strategy for core, and how we wrote patches specifically for this site 7. How we dealt with database clustering 8. How we leveraged the cloud hosting environment, and why just adding servers can be a bad thing
9. Lessons learned, and how some of the issues we encountered are addressed in Drupal 7