One of our clients came to us with a performance issue on their Drupal 6 multi-site installation. Views were taking ages to save, the admin pages seemed unnecessarily sluggish, and clearing the cache put the site in danger of going down. They reported that the issue was most noticeable in their state-of-the-art hosting environment, yet was not reproducible on a local copy of the site — a baffling scenario as their 8 web heads and 2 database servers were mostly idle while the site struggled along.
Goals: A clean, professional, and friendly design with room to write on. (People like to make notes on business cards — namely, when and where they met that person.)
What do you do when you’re one of the world’s top-ten websites, and you support 50 languages, 30 currencies, and four payment systems? And you have, at any given time, about 700 users hitting “reload” to find out up-to-the-minute results of worldwide contributions. You also need a meter to show progress on a site that serves 20,000 requests per second.
