Slashdotted, Dugg, Farked. These are all terms that site operators, bloggers, and web developers are very familiar with. They imply having a site 'front paged' at a website that drives a LOT of traffic to your own site.
Over the past week one of the sites we host, ended up on the front page of Fark.com and Foobies.com at the same exact time. It added up to some very busy days for a site which is hosted in a shared environment (meaning that it has to share resources of a server with other sites) as well as some useful knowledge concerning:
- what kind of load a Drupal powered site can handle when in a shared enviroment
- how to optimize Drupal's capability to handle a large number of visitors
To begin, it need to be understood that overall optimization for site traffic is going to depend on a gazillion different factors. If you don't have a reliable server stack which is already optimimized this article will only do you so much good. Apache, MySQL, and PHP need to be running reliably, and well tuned.
Assuming you have a well tuned server, then how much traffic your Drupal powered site can handle will depend on:
