News, Articles

the Wikimedia Foundation has decided to standardize their infrastructure on Ubuntu Server 8.04 LTS. This means that 400 servers running Wikipedia will eventually be moved to Ubuntu, instead of having a mix of distributions.

We have been using and advocating the relatively under-advertised Ubuntu Server for several years, both for in house development and testing, as well as for client web sites, large and small.

We have been extremely happy with Ubuntu, for the following reasons.

At the last Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group meeting, Lana mentioned a benchmark of Drupal 5.8 vs. Drupal 6.3 by Vision Media in Victoria.

The benchmark concludes that  Drupal 5 is faster than Drupal 6.

Intrigued by this benchmark, we proceeded to replicate it in a rigorous fashion.

One client of ours was facing severe issues with their relatively new well equipped server: the server stopped responding to web requests, and was rebooted, only to stop responding again.

Upon investigation, we found out that pages were taking a lot of time to load.

This only happened when viewing a node in full page view, not when the
nodes were in lists (just as in views, node edit form ...etc.)

Devel was showing this:

Dynamic web applications like Drupal offer a lot of benefits for a web site. However, when it comes to scalability, there can be challenges with any dynamic web site, including those build with Drupal.

Today, Khalid gave a presentation at the Drupal Users Group of Waterloo Region on Uisng CCK, Views and Panels to build Drupal web sites, with minimal programming.

Here are the slides from the presentation, in PDF format.

We've released a new module for performance logging and monitoring of Drupal sites.

The module shows pages and how much memory they are using for each page load, as well as the milliseconds of page generation time for each as well.

The module is intended for developers as they are building and testing sites, as well as site administrators to measure the most resource hungry pages.

Emma Jane Hogbin, of Drupal Socks fame, drove down all the way from Owen Sound to Kitchener today

She gave the same well attended talk she did at Drupal Camp Toronto 2008 on How to port your content from * to Drupal.

From the early days, Drupal had the ability to embed PHP code in its content. This provides flexibility and functionality, most importantly, nodes and blocks can contain dynamically fetched data from the database using custom queries and displayed them in other content.

This is an easy approach to get such data without writing a module. All you need to do is assign the PHP input format filter to the node or block and paste your PHP code in it, and voila, you have dynamic content.

Besides its success on the desktop, Ubuntu has become a popular server distribution as well. With the release of Hardy Heron 8.04, Canonical is making this release a Long Term Support (LTS) version, with 5 years support on servers.

On Friday and Saturday May 23 and 24, 2008, both Khalid and Wafaa
attended DrupalCamp Toronto.

In addition to the Drupal for Fun and Profit talk, Khalid presented the Drupal Performance Optimization for large web sites.

The slides from the presentation are attached.