Introduction

  This paper will outline my test environment, software used and procedures for benchmarking and profiling. This process can apply to both scaling up and scaling out architectures. Scaling out will require a slightly different approach due to the fact that the entire webserver suite and/or MySQL will be split across multiple servers. 

Test System

  My test system is an AMD 2100 with 2GB RAM and single PATA harddrive. (Stop laughing.) It has XAMPP 1.6.6 installed which contains Apache 2.2.8, PHP 5.2.5 and MySQL 5.0.51a with eAccelerator turned off. Drupal 5.7 and the devel module have been installed. The test Drupal site contains 5000 nodes, with 50,000 comments, 5000 vocabulary and terms with a max length of 12. These first attempts at improving Drupal performance will be done with Drupal core only. The only nonstandard module that has been …

Introduction

Improving Drupal's MySQL performance is more than just optimizing Drupal and MySQL themselves. I wanted to mention that the server hardware, operating system, webserver, and PHP also play important roles in deploying the fastest system possible. Benchmarking and profiling a system is a very methodical step-by-step process starting from the hardware, the operating system, Apache, PHP, MySQL then finally Drupal itself.

Server Hardware

Everything starts at the hardware level and having a way to benchmark CPU, memory, and harddrives is very important. Not all motherboards are created equal either. If at all possible, developing a benchmarking plan to test different CPUs, memory and harddrives will go along way to help creating a high performance Drupal/MySQL system. Using sysbench from http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/, it's possible to show which CPU, …

Introduction

Improving Drupal's MySQL performance is more than just optimizing Drupal and MySQL themselves. I wanted to mention that the server hardware, operating system, webserver, and PHP also play important roles in deploying the fastest system possible. Benchmarking and profiling a system is a very methodical step-by-step process starting from the hardware, the operating system, Apache, PHP, MySQL then finally Drupal itself.

Server Hardware

Everything starts at the hardware level and having a way to benchmark CPU, memory, and harddrives is very important. Not all motherboards are created equal either. If at all possible, developing a benchmarking plan to test different CPUs, memory and harddrives will go along way to help creating a high performance Drupal/MySQL system. Using sysbench from http://sysbench.sourceforge.net/, it's possible to show which CPU, …

Apparently, all the work we have put into dealnews.com over the last 11 1/2 years can be had for $250 and can be delivered in 10 hours.

http://www.getafreelancer.com/projects/PHP-Joomla/Clone-dealnews-com-CMS.html

I see it was canceled.  That is smart.  What we do can not be done for that kind of money.  $350?  Maybe. =)

Speaking of dealnews, we have been rated the #1 Black Friday site by PC Magazine.

(The basics — comment here if you’d be interested to hear a non-partisan talk about the technical challenges faced by the IT team during the Obama campaign [particularly if you’re not an American who likes the idea of Obama as President, but even if you are].)

So, we all saw when Jonathan Schwartz posted this on election night:

http://blogs.sun.com/jonathan/entry/change_has_come_to_america

Now, back in December 2001 one of the speakers at LISA (a system administrator’s conference) was a William LeFebvre, who spoke about what it was like to run CNN.com during the extremely high peak times of …

In the UK, tax prices have gone down from 17.5% to 15% .Good news!However, its a bit of a nightmare to change the prices on our websites. We're lucky. We don't have to reprint thousands of pamphlets that have prices for Christmas sales, since we are a primarily web-based company.My boss said that this is like the Y2K bug, only you have 1 week to fix it.
Basically, we need to go over hundreds of pages of code for some 'very' hard-coded tax figures.Our databases will also need to have a look at. I might need to have an all-encompassing function to look for products with tax already calculated into them and update them.Oh well, it looks like it will be interesting.
Wish me luck.

Dear Lazyweb. So, here's my thoughts:

* Create a basic php/rails/insert your application language choice page.
* Have it do a simple SELECT 1+1 from MySQL.
* Print the results to screen.

Are there any third party (independently hosted) monitoring tools out there that (for free or cheap) I can use to then connect to this page, and make sure the results are as expected?

Dear Lazyweb. So, here's my thoughts:

* Create a basic php/rails/insert your application language choice page.
* Have it do a simple SELECT 1+1 from MySQL.
* Print the results to screen.

Are there any third party (independently hosted) monitoring tools out there that (for free or cheap) I can use to then connect to this page, and make sure the results are as expected?