Apache

I finally had a chance to investigate an optimization which I've been wondering about for a while now - serving static files of a site from somewhere else. As a side, but related, experiment I also tested the claim that serving files from a static file server/separate domain/subdomain will speed things up because it results in browsers opening more concurrent requests than they would from a single domain.

For my tests I used lighttpd (pron. lighty) as a static file server for Apache. The idea is that lighttpd, which is acclaimed as being fast and light on memory, will serve the non-dynamic pages of the site (images, CSS, Javascript, etc), which should thereby help relieve Apache of some of its workload. This arrangement involves changing the paths, either on the backend or frontend, to these static resources so that they no longer get served by Apache.

The pieces
All tests took place on my Macbook Pro and involved two pages on a large Drupal 5 site running Pressflow. For the static file server itself, I installed lighttpd using Macports. Two separate pages of the site were tested, the smaller page's number of static files was in the category of 'average' for most sites. The larger page of the two, was very large - 39 CSS files, 23 Javascript files, and 46 image files.

Recently a client we helped get started with Drupal and admin their backend systems for, had their first 100,000+ unique-visitors day.

Everything went well, the lessons we've learned over the years of Drupal performance tuning (Part I, Part II), combined with well planned Apache/MySQL/PHP settings provided an event-free day (other than watching the hit counter go through the roof!).

Showing that it was no fluke, the site has had numerous 100,000+ days since then and has settled into an average of 40-50,000 unique views a day / 1,200,000-1,500,000 visitors a month.

If you have a Drupal site that you need to prepare for high traffic and high availability, give us a shout. We can help you handle it.

It's been a couple weeks since we posted part one of our look at optimizing a Drupal site to withstand large amounts of traffic,
and since that time it happened again - a site we host, got "Farked" (an inbound link from Fark.com) even bigger than it did last time. In the 8 short hours since the link to the client's site went up, and as I write this - the site has received 27,000 + unique viewers. When I logged in there to the site there actually were 1850 users online at the same time.

We just about fell out of our chair when we saw that...

...after all this is a site is that's on a shared server - not a dedicated one. And those kind of numbers would even give some dedicated servers a thorough workout. In the meantime, it was operation 911. Forget the long term issue of finding a larger server space for this site which clearly is outgrowing it's enviroment - that could be handled afterwards. Right now, we had to get the server and site back pronto.

Anyone who runs a site/server for very long will likely find out about the gruesome underbelly of the online work - spammers. They come in many shapes and sizes (most are bots), and with different purposes each, but they each have this in common - they hurt your site/server and it's available resources.

Below are some things to look out for and some methods to take care of one particular type of spam, referrer spam, which can cripple a site/server in no time. With enough referrer spam you'll have what amounts to a denial of service attack (e.g., so many junk requests that the server can't even tend to the real ones).

Example of how serious this can be
Recently one of the sites we host had a big traffic day thanks to being front paged at Fark.com and Foobies.com. 18,000+ unique visitors in 18 hours. Suffice it to say that put quite a load on the shared environment they were hosted in. Well, guess what - the (unrelated) spam attack the site received a few days later actually created more than twice the load on the server that the huge amounts of legitmate traffic did!

Identifying the problem
The first step in fixing a problem is, of course, to know you have one! Referrer spam can be tricky because without knowing where to look you may never realize what is happening in the dark corners of your webserver - you'll just see the symptoms. (a slow site or one that is down completely)