By joe lombardo on

I have this wierd notion of a drupal network that I'd like to express somewhere, and this forum seemed like the best place.

The idea is that drupal sites, already able to share content and communicate with each other, could help each other out in times of heavy traffic or peak demand, serving up images and cached pages for each other. Here are a couple of scenarios to help describe the potential.

First, consider the dean campaign's drupal network. For review, there is an extensive roll-out of drupal based sites for sharing and diseminating campaign information. These web sites have a common goal, are already sharing content with each other and have an interest in seeing each other perform well. Theoretically, if one of the sites got slammed, they could publish their cache to other sites and redirect some of their requests to these sites.

Next, consider drupal sites with no relationship other than the platform they run on. These sites might be willing to contribute some of their bandwidth and memory to a generic pool or cache in exchange for support during heavy traffic, network or server problems.

In contrast to other techniques for managing load and congestion on small sites this looks pretty desireable. In fact as I see it, there are only two other options; pay for a high end hosting solution, or ask your users for help ala BitTorrent.

I realize this is out of scope, has an uncertain value and a large development effort, but I wanted to clear it from my mind.

Thank you,
- Joe Lombardo