We had one of our busiest days on record at the IDEA sites today. With the site slowing to a crawl, our team jumped on the logs and on the phone with Rackspace: Were we being attacked? Was the system failing? We eventually determined that most activity was coming from responses to two emails we sent: a promotion for our IDEA Fitness Fusion Conference and the monthly Body Mind Spirit Review newsletter. The slow site was a product of our success!

So here’s a tip if you’ve got a Drupal site: make sure to turn on site caching. (We had turned it off to make debugging easier.) Also, remember that a Drupal session’s activities (involving PHP, MySQL, and Apache) take a lot of memory. Set the Apache MaxClients directive to a number that keeps the server from moving sessions into virtual memory. (We reset ours from 256 to 32.) Nadeau Software Consulting has some other tips for speed up a Drupal site.