Performance & Scalability

Every person reaches this point with their site development for new sites:

• Development done? Check.
• Theming done? Check.
• UAT done? Check.
• SEO Strategy? Check.
• Marketing Strategy? Check.
• Press releases ready? Check.
• Soft launch with internal users? Check.
• Performance tuning? Umm... wait, what?

Performance tuning is often the last thing people check because they expect things to "Just Work" (TM). Our job as Drupal engineers and developers is to keep the illusion alive. We want to make sure that things go as smoothly as possible for site launch and not end up in a situation where the beautiful new site crashes and burns upon launch.

This session will get you started on the basics of performance tuning. You will learn about what tools to use in order to find the bottleneck of your performance issues. This session will give you a roadmap of technologies that we use on a daily basis in order to help our clients keep speedy Drupal sites up and running. This is not an in-depth class, so anyone who understands intermediate Drupal should get something out of this.

I will also be showing off a framework for Drupal Performance and Load Testing during this session and provide some tools for users to use in order to make performance tuning your site much easier.

With many of the newer Drupal hosting solutions we now find a super-site system of some sort; Drush, Aegir, Pantheon, Gardens, etc. Site Administration by a Drupal enabled super-site make transition from Drupal Administrator to Drupal Multi-Host Administrator or even Drupal Multi-Domain Multi-Host Administrator much easier. With more examples of this type expected during next year, we thought we'd make even easier!

Config management shouldn't just be for sysadmins. Config management is about tracking your config as part of the app. Many configuration management tools exist - cfengine, bcfg2, Puppet and Chef. Notable Drupal projects are already using these tools. Pantheon uses bcfg2 and Acquia hosting uses Puppet. Far too few developers in the Drupal community use these tools and adoption could provide substantial benefit to many developers.

Solr is an open source search platform based on the Lucene, a Java-based indexing and search implementation. Drupal provides a module called Apachesolr that provides some groundwork and basic settings to get you up and running with Solr

"Failures don't plan to fail; they fail to plan." Harvey Mackay Any site with high aspirations should have a plan in place to scale. The key is to identify the components that can help you scale and when you should implement them. In this presentation, I'll go over - at a high level - the infrastructure of sites from basic to advanced. I'll map the infrastructure as I lay it out for clients, Memcached [what it does and why you want it], Static Caching, and Solr.

Hardware matters Well, duh, we all know that. However, most of our Drupal performance discussions center on the software stack – Drupal itself and the LAMP stack, and how we can tweak software to make our sites run at peak performance. In this session I will shine the light on recent hardware trends and how and why you might want to opt for owning a cutting edge server rather than trust the “cloud” or a VPS to perform adequately for you.

Congratulations, you're site is growing! But can you handle the load? In this session we will discuss the many tools available to optimize Performance and Scalability on your Drupal website. In addition, we will also show you how you can measure your sites Performance & Scalability.