One great feature that Drupal has is the ability to make modules run certain tasks, often heavy ones, in the background at preset intervals. This can be achieved by a module implementing hook_cron.

Core uses this feature to index new content for the search module, ping module to notify remote sites of new content, fetch new release information from drupal.org, poll other sites for RSS feeds, and more.

Various contributed modules use this for various purposes, such as mailing out newsletters, cleaning up logs, synchronizing content with other servers/sites, and much more ...

Apache, and all other web servers, have a mechanism to write an "access log" recording every HTTP access to the server. The information that is logged is valuable, and includes things like the IP address of the user making the request, the date and time, the size of the request in bytes, the return code from the HTTP protocol, the request's URI, the referer, and the browser/operating system that the user is using.

The latest Long Term Support (LTS) release from Ubuntu has been with us for a bit over a month now, and I love it so far, on my laptop. This is Lucid Lynx 10.04, and will be supported until 2013 on the desktop, and more importantly, until 2015 on the server.

My servers are still on 8.04 though, the previous LTS, for good reason. 10.04 has PHP 5.3. While this is generally a better PHP, it has some compatibility issues with many Drupal, mainly for contributed modules, but some in core as well.

The long term solution to this is to find all PHP 5.3 compatibility issues and fix them in the code. This is a lengthy process though, and will not happen overnight.

So, in the meantime, there are several solutions for running PHP 5.2 on Lucid, some better than others.

In this post, we examine the different approaches, and the merits of each.

The session that I proposed for DrupalCon San Francisco 2010 on 2.4 million page views per day, 60 million pages per month, one server was accepted, and I just finished giving it.

Note that from the time we proposed the talk, until we actually delivered it, the site hit new records (2.8 million page views per day, 70 million page views per month).

Here are the slides from the session, which I designed to be useful on their own, even for those who did not attend.

For high traffic Drupal sites, using the memcache module is a common method for making sites scale. The memcache module uses the memcached object caching daemon for doing the actual caching.

In this article, we document how we ran into a limitation of memcached, and how we overcame it by a simple patch.