Using a Reverse Proxy and/or a Content Delivery Network (CDN) has become common practice for Drupal and other Content Management Systems.

One inconvenient aspect of this is that your web server no longer gets the correct IP address, and neither does your application. The IP address is that of the machine that the reverse proxy is running on.

In Drupal, there is code in core that tries to work around this, by looking up the IP address in the HTTP header HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR, or a custom header that you can set.

One of the suboptimal techniques that developers often use, is a query that retrieves the entire content of a table, without any conditions or filters.

For example:

SELECT * FROM table_name ORDER BY column_name;

This is acceptable if there are not too many rows in the table, and there is only one call per page view to that function.

However, things start to get out of control when developers do not take into account the frequency of these calls.

Here is an example to illustrate the problem:

Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS finally provides a stable long term support server distro that has a recent version of Varnish in its repositories.

Trouble is, the repository provided package of Varnish has some issues. Specifically, the command line tools, such as varnishhist, varnishstat, ...etc. do not report anything. Therefore one cannot know the hit/miss rates, hits per second, or other useful information. Moreover, monitoring Varnish using Munin for such statistics does not work either.

There are two ways you can overcome this, both are described below.

For sites that have lots of slow queries, disk access is often the bottleneck. For these slow queries, MySQL writes temporary tables to disk, populates them with intermediate results, then query them again for the final result.

We all know that the disk is the slowest part in a computer, because it is limited by being mechanical, rather than electronic. One way of mitigating this is to tell MySQL to use memory rather than disk for temporary tables.

The Boost module is often a great help with speeding up web sites of small to medium size and/or hosted on shared hosts.

It works by writing the entire cached page to a disk file, and serving it entirely from the web server, bypassing PHP and MySQL entirely.

This works well in most cases, but we have observed a few cases where boost itself becomes a bottleneck.

One example was when 2bits.com were called to investigate and solve a problem for a Fortune 500 company's Drupal web site.