Velocity 09: Jeremy Bingham, "Surviving the 2008 Elections"

• Initial problems and bottlenecks at the beginning of the primary election season.
• How optimizing MySQL and the backend improved performance.
• How moving to lighttpd and moving page caching into lighttpd with a custom module greatly improved performance.
• How moving to newer and less hardware improved performance, and how it was done.
• And how sometimes you need to fail spectacularly before you can really get it right.

Jeremy Bingham is the CTO and man-behind-the-curtain for DailyKos.com, a progressive Democratic weblog that is one of the largest sites in the political blogosphere. He considers himself lucky that a gig with the State of Washington fell through a while back, because otherwise he wouldn’t be doing this.