Scalable Drupal Architecture

When bored, our CTO tends to become a bit of a bull in a china shop, taking up a random instance of underperformance and smashing anything that stands in his way of fixing it.

Last Christmas he looked at a traffic graph of a customer having issues with scalability of Drupal...

Drupal performance degradation:

In addition to the cluster flatlining on the Drupal side ("he says "They dont know what are doing. The code is horrible"), you can clearly see that with time the performance of the cluster is dropping.

He found this unacceptable. One week, several kernel patches, and two MySQL patches later his version of the cluster started flatlining the network connections of browsers, not servers, while still maintaining sub 1-second fetch time!

Post Alex's scaling: hey, can we add some more browsers?

Drupal still does not scale, but at least we can make it work over 20 times better than anyone else on the identical hardware.