PUBLIC MARKS from holyver with tag tuning

In this talk, Khalid of 2bits.com, Inc., Inc will talk about a how to scale a Drupal web site with the following statistics. 3.4 million pages per day peak 92 million page views per month 189,650 page views per hour peak 840,000 visits on peak day 22.96 million visits per month 52,747 visits per hour peak So far, this is the highest traffic a Drupal site gets that we heard of. What is amazing is that this web site runs on a single mid range server ...

A Web cache sits between one or more Web servers (also known as origin servers) and a client or many clients, and watches requests come by, saving copies of the responses — like HTML pages, images and files (collectively known as representations) — for itself. Then, if there is another request for the same URL, it can use the response that it has, instead of asking the origin server for it again.

Caching is a great example of the ubiquitous time-space tradeoff in programming. You can save time by using space to store results. In the case of websites, the browser can save a copy of images, stylesheets, javascript or the entire page. The next time the user needs that resource (such as a script or logo that appears on every page), the browser doesn’t have to download it again. Fewer downloads means a faster, happier site.

Vey useful links for cache control and browser behaviors * Explain of cache control in detail (very nice article! ) http://betterexplained.com/articles/how-to-optimize-your-site-with-http-caching/ * The State of Browser Caching: http://www.mnot.net/blog/2006/05/11/browser_caching * XMLHttpRequest caching: http://www.mnot.net/javascript/xmlhttprequest/cache.html

When tuning a site's performance, a system administrator needs certain tools to measure and monitor how the site is doing under increasing load, as well as identify where bottlenecks may be. Linux system performance monitoring tools On Linux, there are several tools available to you to do this. We describe what we have found as the most helpful in this section.

Apache prefork, StartServers, MaxSpareServers and MinSpareServers In the most common case, you will be using Apache in the prefork mode, meaning one process per connection, with a pool of processes pre-forked to standby for connections. The number of spare processes is defined by the values MaxSpareServers, MinSpareServers, while the number to start is defined by StartServers.

Last Sunday I casually wrote a post about the most common pitfalls in photography. I had written the post a long time ago, but I never put it on this site. The story ended up on the front page of Digg, stayed there for nearly 12 hours and was picked up by a bunch of secondary sources, resulting in 100,000 Visitors within a day (most of them within the first 12 hours). Trying to keep my server up and alive, I learned a lot about what it takes to keep the server alive, hence I decided to slide a non photography related post in, hopefully giving everyone who finds themselves in a similar situation some points to consider.