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Comment by JohnTHaller | Hacker News Reader

As the operator of one of the larger Drupal-powered sites, I'm looking forward to playing with some of the news features and functionality (first on my personal site). Granted, I still dread making the transition from D7 to D8 for my production site with 200k registered users, 53k nodes, and 3m unique monthly visitors.

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Care to link your site?

Do you have any blog posts on how you manage to scale with drupal? Have you considered alternative solutions?

Most likely this site: http://portableapps.com/ which is running D7 <meta name="Generator" content="Drupal 7 (http://drupal.org)" />, mentioned on his HN handle.

His blog also running D7 with 2 posts on Drupal, nothing on scale that I noticed quickly. http://johnhaller.com/development

That's it. And I run Drupal on my personal site as well as you noted. I have a handful of other Drupal sites and a couple WordPress sites I help with, too. I'll probably upgrade my personal site first and my internal test sites running on local server instances to play with.

There are a lot of great posts and case studies about weather.com, which is a solid example of drupal in a high performance environment.

Performance has been a specialty for me in my own drupal career. Drupal 8 is a whole new ballgame, though. Cache tags are built in from the ground up, and the page render/caching engine is built to mimic a reverse proxy. Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of the PHP language) benchmarked a pre release of drupal 8 at >2500 page views per second with 20 concurrents.

As mentioned in someone else's post, it is PortableApps.com. I left it off as I didn't want to be self promotional in the reference. Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like. Personally, for PortableApps.com, I've used Advanced CSS/JS Aggregation [1] and LABjs [2] to help quite a bit in terms of caching along with offloading images and static scripts to a CDN (MaxCDN in our case). Moving the MySQL data from a standard server-based instance to Rackspace's Cloud Database instance and the Drupal install from a dedicated server to a cloud server that can be up/downgraded helped as well. All while keeping costs to about the same as the old single dedicated server.

1: https://www.drupal.org/project/advagg 2: https://www.drupal.org/project/labjs

> Mine is far from the largest Drupal site, so other sites like Weather.com and The Onion have done more with large-scale scaling in terms of multiple servers and the like

Don't forget https://www.whitehouse.gov - it's a Drupal 7 site, and I imagine it gets a fair amount of traffic.

The traffic estimation sites online peg whitehouse.gov at around 3m monthly visitors as well.

NB: the onion does not run on drupal anymore. Not for a long time. It runs on Django: https://www.quora.com/Django-web-framework/Why-did-theonion-...

Quite true. They did have one of the largest Drupal sites for a while. I'd wager that the articles that explored how they did it would be a little outdated now as I think they were on Drupal 6 when they switched platforms.

Not to brag, but 3M is by far not one of the largest Drupal powered sites, just one property of the company i work for has more than 40M active users a month & 350M pageviews

I never claimed it was the largest. Just one of the larger ones, particularly as it has a community of 200k registered users all using community forums (most Drupal sites are more in the 100s to 1000s of users). It's the largest I know of offhand managed entirely by a single person and not using any specialized front-end caching or load balancing between the actual Drupal instance and the end user. There are much larger sites run by large companies with all kinds of specialized code and handlers like The Onion, Weather.com, etc.

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