Optimizing Drupal out the wazoo

Speaker(s)
Experience level
Advanced
Time slot

Drupal can be really confusing to scale, that's why there's tons of posts, presentations and stackexchange articles that talk about it. But it's obviously possible when you look at some of the insane scale siteso out there (weather.com, whitehouse.gov, etc). Let's act like we're going to take the best of all of these and mash them into one presentation.

Oh wait... yea that's exactly what we're going to do and more important then hypothetical, this is going to spell out the exact cocktail that I use on ELMSLN to make it smoke on limited resources.

Things you'll learn:

  • Cache bin management tuning / understanding settings.php overrides
  • Making mysql fly w/ apdqc
  • Speeding up all site operations via HTTPRL
  • Drupal core Performance optimization via patches (a little scary) and modules (much less scary, though some still scary)
  • Tuning Advagg (and related modules) and Apache (or Nginx) to max out your YSlow / PageSpeed scores
  • Upgrading PHP / Mysql to 5.5 w/ Remi (for those of us stuck in RHEL 5/6 hell)
  • Using Devel, XHProf or this simple hack to identify bottlenecks in contrib
  • Basic Varnish install (3.x) and what it nets you
  • Cache seeding via HTTPRL Spider
  • Optimizing Vagrant for local development
  • Tuning multisites to eek out additional power via symlinks

This talk will be followed by a BoF where people can get advice on how to handle issues of scale and performance since it can be pretty system specific at times.

Yes, this presentation will be made available and more importantly it'll be a series of gists so you can snag everything you need in convenient copy and paste form as well as be able to comment on my recommendations.

Status
Accepted