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Building an Architecture for Scalability: myLifetime.com on MySQL and Drupal

Kieran Lal

Drupal community adventure guide

Acquia

Nathan Potter

VP Digital Media Technology

A&E TV Network

Recordings and Q&A

• This webinar will be recorded

• Questions will be taken at the end

Introductions and Agenda

•Nathan Potter, VP Digital Media Technology

•Kieran Lal, Drupal community adventure guide

• History of mylifetime.com• Techniques for scaling Drupal• Questions and Answers

About mylifetime and A&E TV Network

• The ultimate source for women’s entertainment

• More than 3.6 million women visit lifetime.com’s web properties

• 50 Million page views per month

• Mylifetime’s web properties include (myLifetime.com, Roiworld.com, DressUpChallenge.com, LifetimeMoms.com, and MothersClick.com)

• A&E is a joint venture of, Walt Disney, and the Hearst Corporation, NBC Universal

Why Drupal?

• Original site was built on custom PHP code• Custom PHP code was not reliable or scalable• Make the site more interactive: comments, voting, ratings• Drupal has a highly flexible architecture• Many developers working on similar issues accelerated troubleshooting as opposed to relying on proprietary experts

Early development

Joining mylifetime

• Coming from AOL•Moviefone, AOL TV, AOL Music

• Proprietary architecture• Increased user interaction at mylifetime• Identify bottlenecks• Introduce architecture improvements

Development and staging

environments

• Development moved out of house to give you

flexilibity

• Switched to using Jmeter across 3-4

development servers to simulate staging

• Full log ins, ratings, and all the interactive stuff

he needed to do

Early architecture

• Promotional sub-sites drive specific traffic• Sporadic volume spikes• Separating anonymous and named user traffic • Traffic increases require ongoing database query tuning

• Tied to programming – difficult to anticipate

Acquiring ParentsClick

• Strong technical team

• Expertise in Drupal 6

• Parentsclick acts as base for mylifetime.com

migration to Drupal 6

• More experience with Solr search

• Drupal 6 had performance and scalability

improvements

Acquired by A&E Television Network

Team today

• 5 developers• Development manager• 3 project managers• Consulting company in India for Q&A

• They will do some load testing and development• 5-6 developers as well as the QA team.

Current architecture

Akamai Content Delivery Network

• Points of presence, International

• Media Extender for anonymous pages

• CDN for Images, Javascript, CSS

• Custom CDN module

• Authcache module distinguishes Akamai traffic

Project runway, and Amish Grace

Web servers

• Apache Webserver and Lighttpd as the origin for

Akamai

• Apache, APC

• Separate Memcache server now, isolate and

improve performance. Stabilized. No net new

servers.

• During Project runway and Amazing Grace

• 15 apache- 5 memcache

• 10 apache – 5 memcache

• Get extra web servers monthly

Memcache

• Started doing page caching from memcache,

bread and butter, comments

Database servers

• 2 Masters for different sections of the site

– Multi-site and apache and different instances

– One of the sites is single sign on custom

• 3rd master is a hot backup of the 2 masters

• Each main master has 2 slaves

• Mostly slave scaling, 8 core and 16 GB servers,

plenty of capacity

• Have slow query and no-index

– Monthly review by DBA

Search

• Lighttpd servers act as Solr servers

• Linux and Java stack

• Solr configuration for HA

• Query and Index server off of both servers

Video

• Monetization of ads

• Akamai delivers videos

• Some video on Hulu

• Fast follow – all shows within 48 hours for full

• 5,000 videos online 2009

• Army wives was first time using fast follow

• Project runway cascading effect, they will go

there when they want to see a show

Network

• 3Par Fiber backbone for failover between DBs

• Isolan Network File System the vendor for the

NAS appliance between web servers

Future of Drupal scalability

• Drupal 7 database layer: Oracle support

– http://drupal.org/project/oracle

• Edge Side Includes

– http://drupal.org/node/651902

• Multi-tier caching

– http://drupal.org/node/621748

• Pluggable menu systems

– http://drupal.org/node/669608

Future of Drupal scalability

• Sequences API, savepoints for nested

transactions

– http://drupal.org/node/669794

• External Cache for reverse proxy caching

– Swap the page_cache implementation in D7 for a fake

cache

• Cloud computing scale on demand

Acquia is Your Drupal Guide

What modules should we install?

Where do we get professional support?

How do we keep our site up-to-date?

...Where do we start?

Acquia's Triple play

Drupal + Acquia = Customer Success

The Drupal Advantage

Rapid assembly approach

reduces custom programming

Modular, extensible architecture

optimized for social publishing

Thriving development

community

Vast module library

Zero software acquisition cost

Industry standard LAMP stack

Strong security track record

The Acquia Advantage

Full lifecycle technical support

Best practices advisory support

Drupal essentials, conveniently

packaged

Fitness & diagnostics via the

Acquia Network

Optimized Drupal hosting

Extend sites with cloud-based

services

Confidence from an enterprise

partner

Questions

For more information, visit:

–http://acquia.com

–http://twitter.com/amazonk

–http://twitter.com/acquia

Contact us:

–sales@acquia.com

–kieran@acquia.com

–888.9.ACQUIA

–Nathan http://drupal.org/user/263042

Case study available at:http://acquia.com/resources/library/case-study-lifetime-

digital