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Well, having been bitten by Drupal in this way repeatedly (before eventually stopping using it altogether), the thing to notice about those million-plus Drupal

Well, having been bitten by Drupal in this way repeatedly (before eventually stopping using it altogether), the thing to notice about those million-plus Drupal sites is that nobody's logged into them. The same cannot be said for the NYT. Drupal doesn't know how to cache anything at all other than for anonymous users. Start logging users in and your problems really get going around the 200-concurrent-users mark, not the 200,000-user mark. At 80-plus queries per page (which for Drupal isn't very many) the database just dies on its arse even at relatively trivial loads when you have multiple concurrent users.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago
Drupal doesn't know how to cache anything at all other than for anonymous users. True for vanilla Drupal, but hardly true for Drupal + modules. You have to keep in mind that Drupal is not some black magic CMS...it's just a PHP framework. No matter what NYT is built in, they likely are employing the same kinds of caching strategies that you can leverage in Drupal. Even if you have 5 queries per page, you're going to need a caching strategy to handle NYT levels of traffic, and Drupal can most likely integrate the same methods. Simple examples include authcache and cacherouter.
- bkudria 16y ago
  Excellent point! Indeed, modules are an excellent way to extend Drupal. The NYT could probably write any they needed, and they'd probably rewrite some of the (excellent-quality!) existing ones to fit their unique needs. What would be the point, again, of working with Drupal? A better photo uploader?
  - ryanwaggoner 16y ago
    I'm not sure if you're replying to someone else, but again, I'm not at all arguing that Drupal is the best choice, just that it's not a completely crazy idea to use a proven, open-source, well-supported CMS like Drupal for NYTimes.com. It could definitely do the job, and I was responding to jcapote's ridicule of the mere suggestion that it could.

ryanwaggoner 16y ago

Drupal doesn't know how to cache anything at all other than for anonymous users. True for vanilla Drupal, but hardly true for Drupal + modules. You have to keep in mind that Drupal is not some black magic CMS...it's just a PHP framework. No matter what NYT is built in, they likely are employing the same kinds of caching strategies that you can leverage in Drupal. Even if you have 5 queries per page, you're going to need a caching strategy to handle NYT levels of traffic, and Drupal can most likely integrate the same methods. Simple examples include authcache and cacherouter.

bkudria 16y ago
Excellent point! Indeed, modules are an excellent way to extend Drupal. The NYT could probably write any they needed, and they'd probably rewrite some of the (excellent-quality!) existing ones to fit their unique needs. What would be the point, again, of working with Drupal? A better photo uploader?
- ryanwaggoner 16y ago
  I'm not sure if you're replying to someone else, but again, I'm not at all arguing that Drupal is the best choice, just that it's not a completely crazy idea to use a proven, open-source, well-supported CMS like Drupal for NYTimes.com. It could definitely do the job, and I was responding to jcapote's ridicule of the mere suggestion that it could.