Submitted by johnh on January 17, 2007 - 18:47.
Apologies if this site looked a little odd today. The server this site runs on is extremely busy, and I've recently been taking matters in hand. One thing which needed to happen today was bumping the IP address here up by one.
Since you asked, I've started the process of consolidating all the Drupal sites on this server - there are about 18 if memory serves - into one installation and 18 Drupal multisite configuration files. That allows me to use the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) to store compiled copies of every Drupal source file in RAM, which gives me quite the speed bump.
To top that off, I've also set up the first six or seven of the domains here to dodge Apache altogether and run instead off a brutally-fast lightweight HTTP server from Russia called Nginx. And punted PHP over to a small collection of FastCGI processes sharing the aforementioned APC cache. And then installed PHP 5, in order that Drupal can finally take advantage of the mysqli_* functions available to it and get yet more speed out of versions of MySQL 4.1 and higher.
Eventually I'll remove Apache entirely, but for now I've saved so much memory that we can run both web servers and still have space left over from the mere 1Gb available to us, without hitting the swap file.
Right now it's all about getting more raw speed without dropping any more money. There's some description about how to make Drupal play nice with an unfamiliar web server here.

Muz (not verified) | February 1, 2007 - 10:51
we need to get you some more money to run this thing
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