On 3/20/07, Scott Hadfield <hadsie@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi All,

I've been thinking about a possible summer of code idea, but I'm not sure it will fly so I wanted to get some feedback.

The basic idea is to look into solutions for running Drupal simultaneously across multiple servers for the purposes of running extremely large/busy sites, for load balancing on multiple servers (both database and web servers), or just for high availability (if one server dies, another will kick in). The project would consist of developing and documenting ways that this can be accomplished and developing tools or other Drupal patches/modules that are needed to accomplish the various tasks.

One of the main problems with this as a SoC proposal is that a large majority of what needs to be done here is OS/web server/database server specific. There would probably be a lot of Drupal specific stuff, but I'm not sure exactly how much.

Even if this won't fly as a SoC project I am still be interested on working on this. What's already been done in this area? Maybe some of this has already been solved?

Thanks for any feedback,
Scott

Scott

Drupal.org already runs on 2 web servers + 1 db server, so the underpinnings are there.

Yes, it involves a lot of tuning of the LAMP stack. See here
http://2bits.com/articles/drupal-performance-tuning-and-optimization-for-large-web-sites.html

However, it also involves finding and eliminating bottlenecks in modules (upcoming article
in the above series). These are definitely code changes, and should be contributed as patches. Offending modules that do not scale well are locale and statistics in core, as well as many in
contrib (e.g. gsitemap)

I would be interested in mentoring such a project, although a multi server setup is not
something I have available. I can provide limited access to a very large Drupal site though
(half a million page views per day).
--
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