Performance

We had a site for a client that was stable for close to two years, then suddenly started to experience switches from the master to the geographically separate slave server as frequently as twice a week.

The site is an entertainment news site, and its articles get to Google News on occasions.

The symptoms was increased load on the server, a sudden influx of traffic causing over 800 simultaneous connections all in the ESTABLISHED state.

One of the things that a default Drupal installation does is that it handles 404s for static files within Drupal itself. In other words, a 404 for a .css or .jpg file causes a full Drupal bootstrap. This is not necessary, and wastes resources on a site that gets lots of 404s: lots of code is executed, many database queries are performed, only to return a 404 for a static file.