March 2010

With a clever hack utilizing Memcache, Nginx, and Drupal, we have been able to speed the delivery time of many of our major pages by 53,900% (from 8,100 msec to 15 msec, according to siege and AB benchmarks). Additional, we went from being able to handle 27 concurrent requests to being able to handle 3,334 concurrent requests (a 12,248% increase).

While we performed a long series of performance optimizations, this article is focused primarily on how we managed to serve data directly from Memcached, via Nginx, without invoking PHP at all.
Nginx, Memcached, and Drupal

Read on for the full explanation of how we achieved this huge speedup.

2010 will be remembered as the year SQL died; the year relational databases were moved off of the front line; the year that developers discovered that they no longer had to force every single object into a tabular structure in order to persist the data.

2010 is the year of the document database. While momentum has been steadily building over the last seven years or so, there are now a wide variety of stable document databases -- from cloud-based ones from Amazon and Google, to a wide variety of Open Source tools, most notably CouchDB and MongoDB.

So what is MongoDB? Here are five things every PHP developer should know about it:

1. MongoDB is a stand-alone server
2. It is document based, not table-based
3. It is schemaless
4. You don't need to learn another query language
5. It has great PHP support

Read on to learn a little about each of these.