DrupalCon Boston 2008 Performance session planning

This is a planning wiki page for those who want to get involved in this.

TODO (Please expand on your section below)

-How performance impacts your business - Michael Myers

• Webserver, File systems, Squid, Architecture tuning ?

• Squid

• What is Squid?
  • Caching Proxy, originally just a caching proxy
  • Moon-lights as a Reverse Caching Proxy, a.k.a. HTTP Accelerator
  • Can increase speed and decrease load by caching some dynamic content and almost all static content
• Squid at the Open Source Lab
  • Discovered by Scott Kveton
  • Many at the lab doubted its effectiveness
  • Saved us through a painful initial growth period
  • osuosl.org
    • Used to hit slashdot quite often
    • Used to be hosted on our underpowered shell server
    • Squid saved the server
• Squid on drupal.org
  • Prevents us from needing a static file server
  • Reduced load on our webnodes
  • Wasn't a silver bullet
• Limitations of Squid with Drupal
  • Didn't have a huge impact on drupal.org because of limitations of squid with Drupal specifically
  • No-Cache Headers
  • Largely doesn't cache static content
  • Static/Dynamic Cache hit rates on drupal.org
• Using Squid as an HTTP Accelerator
  • Configuring squid
    • ACL's
    • cache_peer
    • http_port
  • Configuring Apache
    • Listen on port 8080
    • Disable SSL. Squid can and should terminate SSL sessions.
    • KeepAlive for persistent connections
• Common Squid Problems
  • Stale Cache
  • Scalability
  • Zero Sized Replies
  • Set-Cookie headers
  • Differentiating logged in vs anonymous users

-Database scalability - Master slave, Performance schema design - David Strauss

-Need javascript and CSS tuning - Henrique Recidive or Konstantin Kaefer

Outlined parts of the presentation.

• Linux - Khalid Baheyeldin

  • Distros
  • Compile your own vs. using a distro
  • Disk layout (logs, database, files)

• Monitoring for performance - Khalid Baheyeldin

  • uptime, top and htop
  • vmstat
  • netstat
  • apachetop
  • mtop/mytop
  • mysqladmin/processlist
  • mysqlreport/dbtuning
  • mysql slowquery log
  • Munin
  • awstats
  • Google Analytics

• PHP

  • PHP mod_php
  • CGI
  • FastCGI
  • Other ways to run PHP

• PHP op-code caching

  • eAccelerator
  • Xcache
  • APC
  • Commerical op-code caches
  • Compilers

-Caching for performance - Steve Rude

• Drupal's caching
  • in 5.x
  • What is new in 6.x
  • Caching in your code
• Drop in Cache replacement modules
  • APC
  • XCache
  • Memcache

• Analyzing Drupal with DTrace - Scott Mattoon

• MySQL performance tuning - Jeremy, Narayan

• Why use InnoDB?
  • Mostly ACID Compliant (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability)
  • Row-Level Locking
  • Clustered Indexes
• Why not to use InnoDB?
  • ACID Overhead
  • Some missing features
  • Performance varies (search tables and queries)
• Safe Tuning Options
  • innodb_buffer_pool_size
  • innodb_log_file_size
  • innodb_flush_method
  • sort_buffer_size, read_buffer_size, read_rnd_buffer_size (Context switch timing)
• Possibly Dangerous Tuning Options
  • innodb_flush_logs_at_trx_commit
  • innodb_log_buffer_size
  • memlock
• Transaction Isolation Levels
  • SERIALIZABLE
  • Repeatable Read
  • Read-Committed
  • Read-Uncommitted
  • Performance of Read-Committed
• InnoDB At The Open Source Lab
  • Wholesale conversion when I took over
  • Convincing Clients
    • How Important To You Is Your Data?
  • Summer 2007: db3.osuosl.org hardware failure
• Drupal.org And InnoDB
  • ACID Overhead
  • Resident Memory Demands
  • Clustered Indexes Strike Back
  • When is concurrency a bad thing?
  • Buffer Pool vs File System Cache
  • Search Queries