High Performance Drupal meetup at Filter Digital in Culver City on April 3, 2012: GRAMMY.com Case Study

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christefano's picture
Start: 
2012-04-03 18:30 - 21:30 America/Los_Angeles
Event type: 
User group meeting
Video: Scaling GRAMMY.com, by Kevin Colligan:
http://blip.tv/episode/6224301  

The High Performance Drupal meetup is meeting again on the 1st Tuesday of the month. Please join us on April 3, 2012 at Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency in Culver City located just two blocks from Media Temple, a familiar venue of Drupal meetups on the Westside.

This meetup features a presentation by Kevin Colligan (@kevincolligan) at The Recording Academy @TRAlosangeles, who will present a case study on GRAMMY.com. He will go through the setup used for GRAMMY.com now to keep it fast and stable — Pressflow and Master/Slave databases, Drupal's built-in cache mechanisms, Akamai and Content Delivery Networks, Varnish load balancing and reverse proxies, Memcache and other tricks — and what they're looking at for the future.

Our meetups follow a basic format and start off with Drupal news and announcements, local job announcements, breakout sessions, raffle prizes and full-length presentations. As always, we'll also have community Q&A, during which time anyone in attendance can ask questions, divine answers from the crowd and give brief, 5-10 minute-long presentations known as lightning talks. We'll finish off the night with more networking and a Drupal After Dark at 9:30pm.

About High Performance Drupal

What is the High Performance Drupal meetup about? The "high performance" part of the name is a catch-all to describe Drupal scalability, performance and benchmarking but we also discuss hosting, infrastructure, deployment, monitoring and highly repeatable processes. Also, this meetup has been held at coffeeshops in the past and the addition of caffeine makes our meetings feel as if they go faster and faster as the night goes on.

This is an meetup that focuses exclusively on advanced topics and there will not be a Users Helping Users portion to the evening.

For any changes to our agenda, stay tuned to this meetup announcement or click the Sign up button below (or both!) to be notified when the agenda has been updated.

Thank you to our sponsors!

Filter Digital Light food and refreshments will be served throughout the evening courtesy of our food, drink and venue sponsor, Filter Digital, a digital solutions agency.

Filter Digital's client list spans global brands and Fortune 100 companies to startups and boutique firms. Let us help you create a digital solution that fits your needs!

Exaltation of Larks - Expert Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training Our projector and screen for the evening is being provided by Exaltation of Larks, a Drupal strategy, consulting, development and training company with a team of Drupal experts in Los Angeles.

Exaltation of Larks likes to do hard things on the web and excels at creating and maintaining exceptional Drupal sites with unexceptional budgets.

Agenda

   6:30pm
   Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting
   Projector and tables / chairs setup

   7:30pm
   Introductions and job announcements
   News and upcoming events (Drupal Design Camp LA 2012, DrupalCon Denver, LA Drupal Business Summit, etc.)

   8:00pm
   Community questions and answers
   Breakout sessions

   8:30pm
   Presentation: GRAMMY.com Case Study
   Raffle prizes!

   9:30pm
   Wrap-up, Clean-up and Close-up
   Drupal After Dark and networking session

Join us on Twitter, Google+ and IRC!

During the meetup, several of us will be in the #drupal-la channel on IRC and the LA Drupal hangout on Google+ and all are welcome to join us. The event organizers will also be monitoring Twitter for feedback and questions that mention @ladrupal or use the #ladrupal hashtag.

Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting

The meetup begins at 7:30pm but the doors open a little earlier at 6:30pm for a Drupal Design Camp LA 2012 planning meeting. Stop by, hear how the conference was last year and join the conference organizing team! We'll be discussing venues, insurance matters, the first-ever LA Drupal business summit and other conference activities.

Breakout sessions

We have several spaces available for breakout sessions. This is an opportunity for a open, multi-track format where we break into groups and discuss a variety of topics, such as high performance hardware (SSDs, SSL accelerators, etc.), monitoring and alerts, hosting and infrastructure, and so on. Each breakout session is led by a volunteer who picks the topic, picks the space and can optionally report back to the larger group in the form of an announcement or lightning talk.

Presentations and Lightning Talks

The evening will have a mixture of full-length presentations and brief lightning talks, which are brief, 5-10 minute presentations, demos or discussions that anyone can give. It can be about a new website you're working on, a Drupal module you've written or come across recently that you'd like to talk about, or just a burning question you'd like to ask of the crowd.

Presentation: GRAMMY.com Case Study

How does GRAMMY.com deal with nearly seven million unique users and 30+ million pageviews for the annual GRAMMY Awards?

Kevin Colligan (@kevincolligan) at The Recording Academy @TRAlosangeles will go through the setup used for GRAMMY.com now that keeps the site fast and stable — Pressflow and Master/Slave databases, Drupal's built-in cache mechanisms, Akamai and Content Delivery Networks, Varnish load balancing and reverse proxies, Memcache and other tricks — and what they're looking at for the future.

Raffle prizes! Collect them all! Must be present to win!

Our raffle prizes often include discount codes, magazines, DVDs and books. We are always grateful to our sponsors for their continued support. If you have any items you'd like to donate to the raffle, please contact any of the organizers at the meetup.

Google Map

Location and directions

   Filter Digital
   5782 W. Jefferson Blvd.
   Los Angeles, CA 90016

Filter is located next to Corbis, on West Jefferson Street and is the brick building running along side of the large concrete building. When parking, please choose from one of the many unmarked spaces in the lot.

There is construction of a new metro stop across the street, so please plan to arrive a few minutes early.

FROM THE NORTH:

Head South on S. La Cienega Blvd. (Note, this is what Fairfax eventually turns into). Continue on S. La Cienega until you reach the intersection of S. La Cienega and Jefferson Blvd. Quickly after that you will see the See's Candy store on your right. Turn right (on Corbett) as if turning into their parking lot. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE SOUTH:

Head North on S. La Cienega Blvd. Continue North on S. La Cienega through the intersection of S. La Cienega and Rodeo Rd. You will see Target on your left and The Chinese Laundry shoe outlet. Quickly after The Chinese Laundry turn left (on Corbett) as if turning into the See's Candy store. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE EAST:

Head West on W. Jefferson Blvd. Continue on S. La Cienega until you reach the intersection of S. La Cienega and Jefferson Blvd. There, take a left to head South on S. La Cienega Blvd. Quickly after that you will see the See's Candy store on your right. Turn right (on Corbett) as if turning into their parking lot. Continue down that lane all the way to the end. You will see a sign that says 5788 on the left. There take a right into our parking lot and park anywhere. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

FROM THE WEST:

Head East on National Blvd. When you reach the intersection of National Blvd and Jefferson, continue going straight into our parking lot (You'll notice a metal marquee with both "Possible Worldwide" and "Filter" listed). Park anywhere, then head to the building with the jagged roof and take a right. To find our office, just take a right at the cafe tables.

Drupal After Dark

Even if you can't make it to the meetup, you're welcome to join us for a Drupal After Dark. After we wrap up the meeting and clean up, a group of us will go to a nearby restaurant or pub.

What to bring

Just bring your laptop, your business cards or whatever else you need. You're also welcome to bring some light food, sodas or beers to share with others at the meetup.

About Filter Digital

Filter provides creative marketing solutions and staffing resources. Our services are distinguished by outstanding quality, talented people and exceptional value.

We are both more agile and more cost-effective than traditional agencies because of our unique approach to resourcing and staffing our engagements. Let us help you create a digital solution that fits your needs. Our client list spans global brands and Fortune 100 companies to startups and boutique firms.

About LA Drupal

LA Drupal is one of the world's largest regional Drupal user groups and is Southern California's largest hub for all things Drupal. In addition to scheduling up to 7 regular meetups a month and occasional trainings and social gatherings, LA Drupal members produce special events, code sprints, and the annual DrupalCamp LA and Drupal Design Camp LA conferences.

Attending LA Drupal events is one of the best ways to meet and talk with other Drupaleros and we encourage you to attend meetings and special events regularly. Whether it's to find solutions to problems you've been having, sharing something you've learned or just meeting interesting like-minded people, the LA Drupal events are an essential resource for Drupal professionals and hobbyists alike.

If you aren't already part of LA Drupal, it's easy to become a member and find events in our community calendar at http://groups.drupal.org/la/events

Comments

I should be there

chellman's picture

Signups are closed, but I assume that's an implementational detail, not a suggestion that there's not enough space. Yes?

Sorry about that. There's

christefano's picture

Sorry about that. There's plenty of space and signups are back on. This venue can accommodate us without a whole lot of reconfiguring of the space.

Tonight we'll be doing breakout sessions and will use more rooms than we've used in the past. If there's something you'd like to suggest as a topic, feel free to mention it here or at the beginning of the meetup.

BTMash pointed out at our

christefano's picture

BTMash pointed out at our meetup this week that there's a new Speedy project at http://drupal.org/project/speedy for minifying JavaScript and an accompanying blog post at http://engineeredweb.com/blog/speedy-module

I was curious what the difference is between using Speedy (which currently has a release only for Drupal 7) and Google's PageSpeed module for Apache. With mod_pagespeed, minifying JavaScript is possible when adding this directives to the pagespeed.conf file:

    ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_javascript

Has anyone compared mod_pagespeed's implementation vs. the Speedy module's implementation? Surprisingly, there isn't a discussion yet in the High Performance group about this. If there is one, I could not find it so please let me know if I just missed it.

Be aware of portability

BTMash's picture

Ack, I'd written out a whole post but it disappeared. So this will be a much shorter post.

I'm sure mod_pagespeed and speedy are going to be comparable since you are ultimately packing up js (each one will be different but that is the end goal). In fact, if mod_pagespeed's version works properly, it could potentially be faster since speedy is only minifying core drupal javascript; not your contrib/custom js. So if it can do everything at once, that would be pretty darn slick. mod_pagespeed also offers a whole lot of other niceties (look at https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/using_mod). I initially used mod_pagespeed and it was so easy to get up and running with impressive results.

But looking at https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/mod_pagespeed/filter-js-minify, they're currently saying it is risky to use. There are a few things to keep in mind in this scenario. Because mod_pagespeed is performing the optimization, you do not have control over what that generated code is. A tool that you use to minify whatever set of javascript would give you that control to later go in, change up a file, and commit it and deploy to your server. Same thing with the CSS.

Also, not everyone is using Apache. An increasing number of admins are using Nginx (and don't be surprised to see more Drupal sites on IIS - I've seen a number of folk laugh at the idea but I fully expect it to become more popular). Not to mention various other servers I can't think of at this time, and while mod_pagespeed can be ported to other servers, I haven't seen a lot of activity in this area. Also, a number of folk may use managed hosting like Acquia, Pantheon, HotDrupal, etc which may or may not have mod_pagespeed enabled (for reasons mentioned above). Doing the minifying beforehand for your files means you end up with something that is portable across various server setups and then take advantage of whatever libraries are offered in that web server.

Follow-up on Solr search and tags

kevcol's picture

In the presentation, I mentioned that GRAMMY.com used Solr search with our tagging to build packages. Turns out, that wasn't quite accurate.

In a previous iteration of GRAMMY.com, we displayed tags (via Taxonomy) that linked to Solr faceted search results (ex: "rap" would link to a page with content with the "rap" tag broken up by content type, so Video, Photos, Articles, etc.)

Nowadays, we simply use taxonomy and views to generate the tags and similarly tagged blocks that appear within nodes on the site. See the right column of this article page for an example:
http://www.grammy.com/news/kelly-rowland-talks-career-highlights-and-fut...

Thanks to all who attended the presentation.

Cheers,
Kevin

The video from this meetup

christefano's picture

The video from this meetup has now been posted:

   Scaling GRAMMY.com
   http://blip.tv/episode/6224301

As a refresher, here's the video synopsis:

In this presentation at the High Performance Drupal meetup on April 3, 2012, Kevin Colligan (@kevincolligan) at The Recording Academy @TRAlosangeles will go through the setup used for GRAMMY.com now that keeps the site fast and stable — Pressflow and Master/Slave databases, Drupal's built-in cache mechanisms, Akamai and Content Delivery Networks, Varnish load balancing and reverse proxies, Memcache and other tricks — and what they're looking at for the future.

christefano's picture

We raffled off a SendGrid Bronze membership at this meetup (worth $10 a month) and we just got an even better code that anyone can use.

Use coupon code NEWRELICSILVER to get a SendGrid Silver membership (worth $80 a month) for 3 months.