Jeremy Andrews (aka Jeremy) of Tag1 Consulting has been involved with Drupal for over nine years. He ran KernelTrap.org, which was one of the first Drupal websites that we receiving a lot of traffic. Andrews has continued to be involved with performance and scalability, and he talks about some of the work that he's doing with Examiner.com and Drupal 7 to figure out a lot of the tools and techniques to make the site scalable and performant. He talks about MongoDB, and some of the other scalability improvements of Drupal 7. While there are a lot of scalability improvements to Drupal 7, the performance has taken a hit and they're in the process of figuring out the best practices in that area as well including writing a module to integrate with RRDtool, the round-robin database tool that is used for tracking time-series data. Some other monitoring tools that Andrews mentions include mysqlreport, Nagios monitoring and Cacti Graphs.