Drupal can be really confusing to scale, that's why there's tons of posts, presentations and stackexchange articles that talk about it (which is leads to FUD like this). But it's obviously possible when you look at some of the insane scale sites out there (weather.com, grammy.com, whitehouse.gov, psu.edu, 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. While some of these techniques only apply to Drupal 7, full-stack tuning of things like Apache, PHP and MySQL can be applied to any CMS projects and the Cache-bin abstraction layer discussed in Drupal 7 also exists in D8 (D6 too actually).
Things you'll learn / be pointed of to:
- Cache bin management tuning / understanding settings.php overrides for Authcache, APC, APDQC, Memcache and more
- Making mysql fly w/ apdqc
- Speeding up site operations via HTTPRL
- Drupal 7 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)
- How to get higher PageSpeed / YSlow scores
- CDNs Real and Fake for improving page delivery
- Using Devel, XHProf or this simple hack to identify bottlenecks in contrib
- Cache seeding via HTTPRL Spider and XMLRPC Page Load
- Tuning multisites to eek out additional power via symlinks (DSLM)
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.
