[development] Tip for large site scaling: tracker.module considered harmful

[Richard Archer]

At 6:02 PM -0800 29/11/05, Boris Mann wrote:

>Yep. I'm in favour of the forum, and I think a *private* mailing list
>would be useful as well. The forum to discuss and toss options back
>and forth, the private mailing list (scale at drupal.org? :P) for
>allowing lots of big site maintainers to have private conversations.

I used to participate in the "biglinux" mailing list. It was for
mainly ISPs trying to roll out reliable infrastructure based on
the 1.0 and 1.2 kernels.

We found that almost all our hacks and "war stories" translated
into committed improvements to the kernel.

There are very few optimizations that, if beneficial to large
sites, wouldn't also make small sites faster. If they do happen
to make a small site a little slower, well, it's only a small
site and doesn't generate much load anyway :)

I guess what I'm getting at is that rather than a list or a
book chapter on drupal.org I would prefer to see war stories
posted as bugs to the issues tracker with either a patch or a
description of the work-around.

Things like tables missing indexes on key columns, un-optimized
database queries, wasteful algorithms... they're all bugs.

 ...Richard.