Narayan Newton is a database administrator who has been a long-time member of the Drupal.org infrastructure team since the time that he was a student at Oregon State University's Open Source Lab. OSUOSL hosts a number of open source projects, but they had never seen the type of explosive growth that Drupal has had, and Narayan has observed this growth up close as the servers were melting down.

Narayan gives a little behind-the-scenes history of the scaling challenges of Drupal.org and describes the current server configuration with Varnish reverse-proxy caching, as well as some of the other tools that he uses in order to trace down performance bottlenecks.

Narayan works with Tag1 Consulting and is becoming a co-maintainer of the Pressflow Drupal distribution.

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