Drupal, Site Updates | featured news

Lately, we’ve been adding more local news feeds to the site. Eventually, I want to have most of the major cities across the U.S. covered. What I had noticed since starting this local news project was that the more feeds we've added to the site, the slower the feeds on the homepage updated.

While updating Wopular, I noticed that from time to time, the site would locked up for a couple minutes. Most of the time, I would just wait it out. I finally looked into the slow query log for mysql and found the troublesome query.

I just installed Pressflow and simultaneously updated Drupal late last week. Pressflow is a modified version of Drupal that allows it to scale more easily. For sites with huge traffic and databases, it's essential. It supports database replication, Squid and Varnish reverse-proxy caching, and is optimized for MySQL and PHP 5.

I was testing a couple of caching software to stablize the site. Wopular used to crash 3-8 times a day. I had thought the main culprit was mysql because whenever resources become low, there is a logjam of queries waiting to be processed. They eventually pile up and consume all available resources and crash the site. Since I was able to set the server to reboot whenever it's near the melting point I didn't mind it too much because it only takes about 2-5 minutes.