<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type">
<title></title>
</head>
<body bgcolor="#ffffff" text="#000000">
Boris Mann wrote:<br>
<blockquote cite="mid1457111B-F5D7-40B7-B512-E7B9F9FF8C6F@bryght.com"
type="cite">Hope everyone is finding this useful/interesting....tricky
things like "What sort of hardware/architecture should I recommend to
my clients?" </blockquote>
<font size="-1"><font face="Arial">I certainly found the debates and
discussion of this thread is interesting - even for some off topic
ones!<br>
<br>
In the context of -- bringing drupal to the corporate world (profit or
non-profit organizations), and building high traffic and high profile
sites -- this is where my initial question stem from, we are talking
about a few things here:<br>
</font></font>
<ul>
<li><small><big><font size="-1"><font face="Arial">Initial proposal
to the client - the focus of this phase is to win the project without
exploring all the glory details, nor do we have the data in some cases.
</font></font></big>I will say at this stage we only need to be
"roughly right" - so we don't fall on our face on the first day of the
site launch, nor do we require the client to upgrade to a different
hardware
platform/deployment architecture in less than 3 months is the
objective. At this stage,
I will recommend as much hardware as possible, based on clients'
affordability, but have to be able to speak in confident of why those
capacities are required.</small></li>
<ul>
<li><small>I found it will be hugely useful if we can collect or
publish some information like this: <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://drupal.org/node/26707">http://drupal.org/node/26707</a> for a
few sample sites that are live. This will provide the bars or whether
we should go higher or lower, we can have a pointer to alexa.com for
the site traffic, a description of the server/deployment architecture
and a list of most actively used modules etc.<br>
</small></li>
</ul>
<li><small>initial site deployment - this is where some basic
tuning
might be required to get the most out of the system. I don't think it
will be a good use of time to go too over board on system tuning at
this stage if
it has not been screaming for help yet.</small></li>
<li><small>Then the last one is the heavy duty tuning once it is in
production for a while, I do feel this requires experience over time
and there
may not be too many hard and fast rules that are applicable to all
cases. I guess this is where high paid db consultants come in :-).
With that said, publishing any findings will be useful, be that small
sites or large sites, as some of the tunings are really drupal specific
which is not a knowledge that we can acquire somewhere else.</small></li>
</ul>
<small>Back to my first point of site profile, this is one of
the sites that we have <a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://afrotalk.biz">http://afrotalk.biz</a>, a pretty basic drupal site
run on a VPS and I have done zero tuning on the system. With constant
800-1000 visitors I have not seen the system go any higher than 15% of
the cpu usage (a dual cpu system), and memory is always about 85%
with 512 RAM. I'm thinking what a waste, with some tuning I can put
at least 5 more sites on the same system given the VPS provider allows
us to burst up to 2G RAM ...<br>
<br>
Anyhow, if we are talking about bringing drupal to the corporate world
-- which I feel it has a huge potential and very passionate about it,
we ought to collect some site profile data that will help us to
"propose in confident" . Perhaps in the future this "consulting" list
can act as a
sales department to the "development" list to bring some funding in
:-).<br>
<br>
cheers,<br>
Clara</small>
</body>
</html>