[consulting] scaling sites with restricted downloads

[Khalid B]

> however, the problem that drupal is loaded for each pfile:// remains.
>
> But.... this is IMO a general issue for drupal. I recently got hammered
> (webschuur.com has been down more then up) by several RSS spiders. for EACH
> feed complete drupal is loaded. Same goes for "dynamically generated CSS or
> JS. We need a FILE_SERVER or so bootstrap, where drupal is loaded in file
> server mode. possibly only fetching some cached thing from a DB, or so.

There was talk sometime back on a mini-bootstrap that would be usable for
things like images, Ajax, ...etc. by  reducing the overhead of the bootstrap
for these type of calls.

Until then, the only viable option is to use a PHP code cache (e.g. APC).