Search

While Mercury has previously demonstrated the raw power of Varnish to radically accelerate the delivery of cached pages with Pressflow, that's only part of the battle for high performance Drupal. Cached pages need to be generated at least once, and logged in users will be bypassing Varnish when making requests. While it's nice to know you're covered for massive traffic spikes, what about baseline load?

Well, we want to answer that question too. Keep in mind that depending on your module/theme stack, your mileage may vary. A lot. Performance tuning a complex Drupal site for logged-in traffic requires sustained diligence at the application level — code profiling, slow query log review, innovative app-specific caches, etc — as well as hardware and system optimization. However, to set some baseline expectations, we used Jacob Singh's greate starter test suite and checked out a Mercury install on a 512MB Slicehost VPS. The results are quite encouraging.

Hi Highperformance Group!

Our organisation started using Drupal about a year ago. We are experiencing very slow page loads on our website - often up to 1 min or more. The server load average correspondingly high - mostly around 4-5, some times up to 30-40 and even more.

We have a setup with a load balancer that points to 2 squid servers listening and serving as cache to 4 machines, and we have it in pairs:

squid1
|-www1
|-www2

squid2
|-www3
|-www4

Each squid is configure to send requests to their requests:

I have 2 front end web servers load balanced with 2 memcached server, 1 with 12 GB total RAM and the other with 4 GB total RAM. Here's the configuration I'm considering to implement.

$conf['cache_inc'] = './sites/all/modules/cacherouter/cacherouter.inc';
$conf['cacherouter'] = array(
'default' => array(
'engine' => 'memcache',
'server' => array('memcache1:11211', 'memcache2:11211'),
'shared' => FALSE,
'prefix' => '',
'static' => FALSE,
'fast_cache' => TRUE,
),
'cache_block' => array(
'engine' => 'memcache',