Deprecated - Performance and scalability

When we upgraded to version 5.5 we no longer are able to submit to our search. Has anyone else experienced this?

For some reason I'm finding Drupal on localhost (xampp) on Vista much slower than on XP. On my old (and slower) XP machine, pages would typically load in around 700 or 800ms. On the faster Vista machine it is around 3600ms. This is out of the box, without extra modules running.
I turned off zonealarm, but that didn't make any difference. Is anyone else having this problem?

At this point I am completely out of ideas. The site is hosted on a GoDaddy VPS and according to Google Analytics got 450 hits and 1300 page views today. Is that really enough to bring the whole server down?

I have the PHP memory limit set to 128MB so I don't know whats going on.

Just today the site has been down six times due to these errors. Here is an example:

Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 14942208) (tried to allocate 19456 bytes) in /home/ftb/public_html/sites/all/modules/views/modules/views_node.inc on line 628

The problem in a nutshell: Status messages are being cached on the front page for anonymous users.

Example: Cache is set to "Normal". An anonymous visitor does anything resulting in a status or error message being displayed (sign up for an account, send a message through the contact form, etc.). The message is displayed to that user, but is then cached. The next anonymous user visits the site, and sees the cached message, and wonders why they are being told that their message has been sent.

What I think is happening:

1. Cache is enabled (of course) as "Normal".
2. An anonymous user does something resulting in a message to be displayed.
3. Since a message is to be displayed, the cached version of the current page is not retrieved (page_get_cache()).
4. The page is processed and themed.
   • The $message variable in phptemplate is populated using theme('status_messages').
   • theme_status_messages() calls drupal_get_messages(), which clears the status messages from the user's session variable.

Hi - I've read a lot of topics on the site and am looking at switching to using Drupal, but my basic questions are:

What is the general way to scale in order to handle more traffic? More specifically:

a) If I need to throw more webservers into the mix, can Drupal handle this easily? (I've read that people are using rsync to mirror files from a master server).

b) What about the database? If I start adding webservers, will the database start getting creamed as a central point of failure? Does Drupal have built-in support for either replication or partitioning?

Drupalers,

I am setting up a dedicated production server to host one Drupal installation running multiple sites (100+). I am wondering what the ideal solution is for configuring this server, and would appreciate feedback from those of you with more hardware knowledge.