The Drupal Association has used some of the money that it acquired thanks to the Drupal community and its sponsors to buy more computing power for the infrastructure that all services of drupal.org are hosted on.

Due to SUN's Startup essentials programme we were able to get their hardware at discounted prices and helped ourselves to three X4170s and one X2270. The X2270 will our join our pool of webservers, one X4170 will replace the CVS and mail server, the others will become database servers with 32GB each.

The machines have now arrived at our hosting party OSUOSL and will be put into service soon. The most important task is getting CVS migrated to a faster machine.

The other machines have been ordered in order to absorb some of the growth we have been experiencing over the past year. Drupal.org serves now about 30 Mio pages per month whereas it only served 20 Mio pages per month 1 year ago. Another reason was that we expect the redesign to require more resources and we want to be prepared for that.

We would like to thank all the members of the Drupal Association; your money makes it possible for the Drupal Association to facilitate the growth of the Drupal Community. If you are not a member, please become one now!

Below are some images provided by OSUOSL.

Once in a while I log into google to look at their webmaster tools and what they say about drupal.org.

Yesterday, I did that again, after a hiatus of several weeks. I noticed, that google had sent me three mails which didn't make it to my inbox because I hadn't configured email forwarding.

After fixing that I looked at the mails.

One was abotu their services, they want me to use Adwords and offer some free budget. The other two were almost identical and they probably had sent the second one after I didn't react on the first:

Google thinks we have too many links!

They said that the huge amount of links may lead to googlebot not being able to index all of them and we should consider if maybe we could exclude some through robots.txt.

Helpfully, they also gave a number of example links. While some of them are perfectly valid links, others are indeed not needed. Most of these contain some sort parameter. Strangely enough, some of the sample-URLs are already among the ca 1 Mio local URLs that we block through robots.txt.

I have now added "solrsort" as a forbidden parameter and hope that it helps both google and us. Our search infrastructure has had the occasional hickup and if google searches now less, it sure is a win-win situation.