Post-lunch of brie, smoked oysters, bruschetta and chianti salami, I worked my way into another session by Kieran about the scalability of Drupal.org which boasts massive traffic and an enviable Google PR 9.

Suffice to say there were plenty of foibles from overloaded sites in underpowered data centers, to crashes but the hiccups are/were tended to by able but overworked Drupalists, sysadmins, and hardware geeks to adjust, optimize, and efficientize to rapidly growing content tube - see the Drupal.org traffic graphs for yourself.

A few topics which added to the discussion were "how to figure out which module are "best" and work well with others" and MySQL vs Postgre databases, and Google's love of indexing whenever a new timestamp is added (which can be *too* much love). I am realizing that many of these Drupalists are so "close to the code" that advertising/promotion, SEO, and "making money with this" are not tantalizing topics of interest screaming for more chitchat.

Back in the squeaky chair room, another friend of Raincity Studios, Chris Bryant is presenting about popular and high-profile Drupal-powered sites. - Kind of a high level casestudy-type view of the big movers who are using Drupal and what they are doing with it.

"Customers" range from a Dept. of Defense info sharing sites (with 20 frontend Drupal servers) to German Playboy to Lonely Planet - each using in unique way from private Intranets for knowledge sharing to multiple mini-sites and beyond.

IBM posted a great article "using open source software to design, develop and deploy a collaborative web site" (which is IBM's most popular developer document apparently).

Plenty of other open-source software projects also use Drupal for their community management (Unbuntu (a Linux distribution), Spread Firefox, ...

Wow, another site doing good things - Openarchitecturenetwork.org enabling sharing of technical knowledge to build sustainable, appropriate shelters in developing countries and areas affected by disaster.

Other sites of note (with statistics, traffic, key modules, etc.)

Satirical news site The Onion is wicked popular (PR 7) and a Drupal site, here's more:
Linux Journal
The New York Observer
Ads of the World
Cornel Daily Sun - cornellsun.com
Twit.tv - Leo Laporte's geek media empire
Mtv UK
Linerieder
United Nations End Poverty
Adobe's Flex

More celebrity sites and discussion of using Alexa to gauge traffic and popularity. Almost no sites are showing more traffic than Drupal.org which is well ... weird.

He's shown a few Raincity projects including Jennifer Lopez which provides an opportunity to point out that Warner Bros. and Sony/BMG are using Drupal for artist sites BUT tis hard to crank out sites for 150+ artists so they use a common code base which ends up to be easier maintained than the former Flash-heavy sites. Britney Spears is Drupalized (wonder if she cares?) oh yeah Harvard University too.

My fave Dead.net! I gave shout out for this awesome (PR6) site and logged in to see what's new (though i wish they'd go back to direct track downloads in the Taper Section and GD Hour rather than the streaming but bandwidth is an expensive mistress). Beautiful and useful.

Wow the list goes one and one, ... lots of entertainment type sites and in general the audience is trying to get a handle on "what size of site popularity can Drupal handle?" No one exactly knows.

Chris and Kieran's project is helping to find out.

Add your fave popular Drupal site at and answer the following queries:

Website URL:

Info:
Company:
Development firm/team:
Est. date launched:
If part of a multisite setup, how many total sites?:

Stats:
Current number of nodes:
Current number of users:
Est. database size:

Traffic:
Avg visits/day:
Avg page views/day:
Avg visitors per/day:
Avg visits/month:
Avg page views/month:
Avg visitors per/month:
Est % authenticated users:
Est GB transferred/month:

Other:
Key Modules Used:
Any special challenges faced:
Additional Notes: