I recently (yesterday) got my hands dirty with a huge news-site in Greece that suffers from really bad performance!
I checked the filesystem and saw that the previous admins placed all files under the "sites/default/files" folder, without creating subdirectories. Now there are more than 20000 files under there, increasing by 100 per day.
Could this be the source of all evil? The owners of the site say that the problems are getting worse every month so I imagined that by re-arranging files in the file-system I would gain something in performance.
I thought of two solutions, one of them not being so professional...
a) use something flike ilefield_paths and try to fix the file-system
b) create a new content type, design it very carefully and let the old nodes perish
Should I try the first option? Do you believe it is worth it?
As for the second option, apart from making me shy even by saying it, it solves many other problems since it would allow me to redesign the Views and/or Panels. I am really thinking about it seriously, but for the near future, once I get most of the other errors fixed.
The site is live for more than two years and can be found at http://tvxs.gr
3 months ago Varnish started serving the anonymous users, but many problems still remain.
There are occasional 500-503 errors and sometimes it doesn't even fetch text and/or images. It actually seems like the SQL returns nothing! I'm now searching for a solution to these too...