Today is Earth Day, and we are trying to keep the Earth Day web site rolling with the massive amounts of traffic that have been hitting it.

We were expecting about 25 million visitors to the site. Then Google decided to be all environmentally friendly and link to the site from their home page. Then Apple decided to be all ecosensitive by making the integrated iPhone app the number one app in their featured section. We really appreciated it when the servers were suddenly all spitting out 600 pages a second with no warning. Read More >>>

In between sessions at Drupalcon DC I was asked if Trellon generally implements bookmarking tools such as, sharethis or addthis, for clients? I started to answer that we have no preference but stopped myself when I remembered a client situation with Sharethis. When the Sharethis component was installed it made page load times slow and it had some script caching issues. In this situation it resulted in page loads of over 20 secs and obviously lead to us having to seek an alternative solution. Read More >>>

Here at Trellon, clients come to us all the time to looking for solutions for making knowledge more accessible through their web sites. Given that search features are a primary tool for exposing data and that the performance of Drupal's search engine is less than optimal in certain situations, we developed a module that replaces Drupal's native search features with the Xapian search engine. And here's why we did it.

Reason

A common challenge for Drupal sites is working with documents in different formats and getting them into the search engine. Drupal does not natively index PDFs and Word documents, despite the fact they are the most commonly exchanged text formats on the Internet (outside of HTML). This presents problems for sites where content is driven by document uploads, and has lead to some sub-optimal solutions and messy UI workflow patterns in the past.

Another challenge is performance. While Drupal scales well in terms of serving pages through the use of memcache, CDNs and op code caching, search functionality is another matter entirely. The organic nature of searches often defies attempts to bring this important subsystem to scale in high traffic environments. Alternative search engines, like Google's Site Search and Yahoo's web services, often need to be leveraged in order to handle the demands that come along with high utilization.

To attempt to solve these problems, Trellon spent some time working with at alternative search engine solutions for Drupal, and one product we came across that can get the job done is Xapain. We have just released a module that replaces Drupal's native search with Xapian, and it can be downloaded from it's Drupal project page Read More >>>