
But on the other hand, do you want those sites to reserve server capacity that isn't needed? Wouldn't you rather use that spare capacity to get you through the spike? If you run 50 sites from a single cluster, and one of them gets a huge traffic spike - does that mean the other 49 might be starved of resources? Certainly. For most use cases, memory is the most contended resource, so anything that frees up memory is very welcome. This saves memory, and frees that memory for other uses. By extension, this means that many sites can share a single opcode cache. With multi-site, many sites share the same Drupal and module code. APC, an add-on, is the most commonly used opcode cache today but PHP 5.5 introduced an opcode cache, opcache, into the PHP trunk. An opcode cache keeps the opcodes in memory, removing the compilation step entirely, greatly speeding up execution.

Without an opcode cache, this compilation needs to happen on every single PHP request.
#ACQUIA DRUPAL HOSTING COSTS CODE#
When PHP executes, it needs to compile this source code to what is called opcode. This means that there is no compilation step when deploying code - you simply deploy your source code text files. Multi-site is a very efficient use of a server’s resources. The key consideration is how you manage updates hosting a multi-site installation is not that different to hosting any other Drupal site. But as I've said, this doesn't mean that you are locked into any particular hosting model. Multi-site doesn't need to mean a Single Point Of FailureĪll sites in a multi-site share the same underlying Drupal core code, at a minimum. Just because your code is stored in a single codebase doesn't lock you into a single server, cluster, or configuration. You could have a single multi-site codebase deploying to any number of different server clusters.

It's important to remember that multi-site is a way of managing code, not for deploying it - all of the scalability best practice that years of Drupal hosting has taught us applies as much to multi-site as it does to multi-docroot.
#ACQUIA DRUPAL HOSTING COSTS HOW TO#
In this post, I am going to talk about how to manage multi-site at an infrastructure level, and the considerations you should take when deciding upon your site architecture. In my previous post, I wrote about how multisite is a powerful mechanism for code management.
