Uptown Almanac

Uptown Almanac is an award-winning San Francisco culture, events and news blog serving thousands of page views a day and required a fast, scalable and eligently designed and branded site to handle load and reflect the site's rich content.  Because its posts regularly wind up on popular aggregation sites, the site had to be built to withstand significant traffic spikes.  We approached performance from a few angels.  Primarily, we utilized Chapter Three's Pantheon project that greatly assisted with server-based caching, allowing the site to get hammered with traffic without having to call the database on every pageview.  From there, we utilized Amazon's Cloudfront CDN and the Cloudfront module to push all uploaded images to the CDN.

The CDN implementation presented a technical problem and one that Drupal 6 was not prepared to handle.  Because Uptown Almanac is a blog, most images are within the content body and therefore not processed by the Cloudfront module.  For this reason, we wrote our own processing script that scrapped all the images displayed within the content, replaced them with the images hosted on the CDN and cached the result for performance optimization.  Doing so made it so 100% of the images on the site were loaded from the CDN, helping speed up the site for all users.

With the help of Cloudfront, the Pantheon Amazon AMI, a custom CDN processing script and some server configuration magic, Uptown Almanac wound up on the front page of Reddit within two weeks of the project launch with no measurable slow downs.