Alnatik.com
Our role :
- UI/UX design (Testing)
- Drupal code
- MariaDB & Nginx optimizations
The experiment
Alnatik (الناطق) : An Arabic term for Speaking or "The speaker", is an experimental RSS Aggregator relaying on multiple news sources to aggregate and categorize content. The challenge was well known from the very beginning : the database size will increase very quickly, and we will have to optimize the hosting architecture but most importantly : Maria DB and Drupal.
Drupal and Maria DB limits
After 60 days from launch, the database size grew to 4 Gigabytes, and Drupal started showing huge loading times (4 to 6 seconds for the home page) so we decided to disable some modules (Syslog was an SQL and a memory hog !)
Still running
Our team put MariaDB through rigorous testing, the we decided to tweak it more so it can take full advantage of a modest 4 cores CPU and 16Gb of ram.
My.cnf :
- innodb_buffer_pool_instances = 24
- innodb_buffer_pool_size = 24G
- innodb_log_file_size = 1G
- innodb_thread_concurrency = 16
- query_cache_limit = 4M
- query_cache_size = 96M
- key_buffer_size = 64M
Even if the database size is now 59Gb, the website still loads fast enough to pass some speed tests, the result is good enough and the next step is more exciting : Converting all of Drupal Content to a NoSQL database like MongoDB in the near future.
