Pisochalet.com - Real Estate Portal

Main Goal: Boosting Drupal speed

The Project started in January 2011, with Drupal version 7 . After some modules we saw it was too slow, also we noticed the lack of stable / production modules.
Not being able to get over this Pitfalls we went back to Drupal6.

2011

- For frontend we choosed Genesis Theme. It is lightweight and Standards compilant
- In this phase, first design was finished.
- Also, first layout was finished
- Due to speed issues, the site we over-cached the site, which made it un-usable

2012

- New people in team ^_^
- Pressflow core replaced Drupal core
- The design was polished, new logos, new colours, etc
- New speed-up features where installed: Boost module, CDNs where included: AWS & CloudFlare.com, ADVCSS/JS agregation (surprisingly this wasn't enough :/ and site still got over-cached )
- At the end of the year, a new approach was used to speed-up page. We removed most of the CCK modules and de-normalized the remaining CCK tables to 1 new table (... incredible... even with this, site was slow)

* In the Front-end, we included:
- Custom made Backbone.JS consuming a JSON webservice, and,
- Several Google Version 3 API modules

2013

- Server has been moved to a SMP GNU/Linux dedicated server in North Europe (Custom installed 'crafted' Debian)
- Memcache module in Drupal, and a memcached daemon in OS
- Varnish as Reverse proxy
- APC opcode cache