performance: how fast it is.
scalability: breadth, a lot of people can do the same thing at once.
he’s more of a server-side guy, but don’t ignore front-end. (which was all in yesterday’s talk)
diagram of process of getting to the site. browser cache, if it’s accurate, is best of all possible worlds, speed-wise
caching at multiple levels: it’s caches all the way down.
a lot of f-bombs in this presentation. interesting.
history of drupal: first actually popular drupal site: the website fell down under slashdotting. so, very basic page caching, which is still with us.
PHP caching! dynamically compiled language, when you make a request, reads all of the files and compiles them into executable code on the fly. cool, but slow. “build an app every time you make a page request” so then OpCache, APC, speeds site by “like 10x” (should probably check on that.)
CSS/JS aggregation, starting with D5. 3 requests rather than 35.
Pressflow? Friendly fork of drupal made for high performance. Can generally install right over existing drupal installation. huh. http://pressflow.org/
Big sites don’t upgrade until contrib catches up, and until big projects upgrade, don’t always know where the pain points are…and then drupal is frozen, feature-wise.
Link back to the xhprof session for finding the spots where things break down. (damn I wish I’d had that during the themekey debacle.)
not every drupal problem has a drupal solution.
(yesterday I was too warm. today I’m too cold. dammit.)
Varnish is so much better than page cache for slashdotting-type issues. (anon visitors hitting one page all at once) Still invoking PHP, querying database, etc. https://www.varnish-cache.org/
because it’s smart, it’s slow. where Varnish is stupid/simple, but really really fast.
mysql: the end of all optimizations – if you’re stuck optimizing that, then you’re at the last resort.
downside of drupal caching: still hitting the database.
memcache abstracts that layer (oh, hey, didn’t this come up earlier, in some other session?) – improvements to scale (vs speed) – take the busywork away from the smart systems.
search! “mysql/php possibly the worst option for full-text search” eep.
apache solr as the right away to do search, because it was built from the group up to do that. built-in porter-stemmer. whoa.
stuff for the future. views with solr?
takes a lot of CPU cycles to process Drupal page requests, esp as you add modules.
no more special snowflakes.
stuff pantheon is doing…includes a site for the UN.
the one-click dream.
“offcache”?
boost module – big step forward.
