---
title: "Narayan Newton on Drupal.org Performance and Scalability"
url: "/podcasts/drupal-voices/narayan-newton-on-drupalorg-performance-and-scalability"
type: episode
date: 2009-10-20
updated: 2014-04-09
---

# Narayan Newton on Drupal.org Performance and Scalability

#  Narayan Newton on Drupal.org Performance and Scalability 

  

*Podcast episode player*

[Narayan Newton](https://www.tag1.com/) 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.](https://osuosl.org/) OSUOSL [hosts a number of open source projects,](https://osuosl.org/communities/) 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](http://varnish.projects.linpro.no/), as well as some of the other tools that he uses in order to trace down performance bottlenecks.

Narayan works with [Tag1 Consulting](https://www.tag1.com/) and is becoming a co-maintainer of the [Pressflow Drupal distribution.](http://pressflow.org)

[Download Audio](https://www.lullabot.com/audio/download/632/DrupalVoices064.mp3)