High Performance Drupal meetup in Mar Vista on April 28, 2011

We encourage users to post events happening in the community to the community events group on https://www.drupal.org.
christefano's picture
Start: 
2011-04-28 17:00 - 20:00 America/Los_Angeles
Organizers: 
Event type: 
User group meeting

Caffeinated Drupal at Drupal Cafe Interested in Pressflow, Varnish, Pantheon and memcache? Want to jump from shared or "grid" hosting to VPS or dedicated hosting but aren't sure what to do? Do you just want to get more out of what you currently have and take your Drupal site to the next level?

Meet with friends, have coffee and talk about Drupal performance on the Westside at the Venice Grind between 5-8pm on Thursday, April 28, 2011. Afterward, we might go for dinner somewhere nearby or a stiff drink across the street at the Good Hurt. You're invited!

To get last-minute updates, sign up by clicking the Signup button below or stay tuned to the comments on this page (or both!).

When: 5pm to 8pm on Thursday, April 28, 2011
Where: Venice Grind at 12224 Venice Blvd, Los Angeles, CA 90066

How to prepare for this meetup

Just bring your laptop, a copy of Pro Drupal Development or whatever else you need. There's plenty of metered parking on Venice Blvd. as well as free parking in the back. Parking on the street is free after 6pm, so be sure to feed your meter if you come at 5pm.

If for some reason you need a lot of bandwidth, please note that the free wireless at the Venice Grind is limited to 1Mb per client, so bring your MiFi router, a phone you can tether with or your credit card to get a 5Mb connection for the day.

Topics

Google MapThis time we'll be focusing on High Performance Drupal. If you're interested in things like Pressflow, Varnish, Pantheon, and memcache, or if you already know about multi-tier infrastructure and want to talk about things like Virtualmin, AWS, RightScale, Chef and DevStructure, this is the place for you.

Location

We're meeting in the back patio at the Venice Grind café on the corner of Venice Blvd. and S. Centinela Ave. Their phone number is 310-397-2227.

If it rains or there are too many people and we need more space, we will rendezvous at Coffee Connection, which is right around the corner. We met there once before for a DrupalCamp LA 2009 planning meeting. Stay tuned by clicking the Signup button below or check comments on this page (or both!) before the meetup.

Comments

I think you ought to do this

burt.lo's picture

I think you ought to do this in Orange County so that San Diegans can join you. Selfish, yeah, you bet.

Otherwise, this sounds amazingly cool. Timely, as I've been butting my head against the performance limitations of shared hosting.

This doesn't seem like the type of event that you can easily record/share. I'll have to see about making arrangements for myself to get up there.

Thanks for making this happen!

Project Management: http://www.sagetree.net
Coaching Services: http://burtlo.info

If there's a presentation or demo

christefano's picture

If there's a presentation or demo, we'll record it. For goodness sakes, we build big websites and can certainly figure out a screen recording program.

There was an AWS presentation in Orange County last year. Why not do something like that again? Let me know if you you know of any good venues. My basic criteria are great espresso, easy parking and enough space for a good-sized group (I'll accept two out of three, so long as great espresso is one of them!).

SandCamp paid for four Pro

burt.lo's picture

SandCamp paid for four Pro accounts at screencast-o-matic.com. That allowed recordings up to an hour. For those presenters that used it, it worked fine. PM me for credentials if you'd like to use that.

In fact, the subscriptions are valid until next January. If others would like to use the service on behalf of SandCamp, contact me.

Project Management: http://www.sagetree.net
Coaching Services: http://burtlo.info

Not sure I'm going to be able to make it :(

BTMash's picture

Seems like I may be a bit busy that evening to be able to make it out to this meetup which is a shame since most of you know I'm all about software and performance :( I'll try and figure out a way to come so can partake in the performance loving.

I'll do my best to make it

mlazar's picture

So far the schedule looks open.
-Michael.

I hope to make it. Pantheon

laura s's picture

I hope to make it. Pantheon is my daily bread. Especially would be interested in ngnix.

Laura Scott
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development

advanced topic, awesome! vps: scary!

mike stewart's picture

definitely worth discussing and I think its awesome christefano is talking about it again. but imo, vps should be synonymous with the Robot quote from Lost in Space: "Danger Will Robinson, danger!"

VPS is not for the faint of heart and should not be considered easy, even if there are tutorials my mom could follow to setup a server. vps simply isn't for someone that makes their bread and butter as a designer, themer, developer, or Drupal project manager. VPS is for administrators and linux gods, or companies with 24/7 access to that type of personnel.

do not under estimate the risks of something going wrong on a *nix server. and one of these administration tasks can quickly take down or disable a server: security. performance. networking. backups. disaster recovery. upgrades. if you're not an ACE at all of these things, its like being in Vegas: just a matter of time til you go bust.

so what should you do if vps isn't for you? probably some form of shared hosting or managed servers are the only viable solution for people that don't spend their time maintaining servers.

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

Don't let this comment scare you off

christefano's picture

Don't let this comment scare you off, folks. High performance hosting is only one thing that can be discussed at this meetup, and as with everything else there are high performance tips and best practices that plenty of us in the community are willing to share.

Sure, running ones own server isn't for the faint of heart. If you're happy with shared hosting or have limited time and resources, then this meetup is probably not for you. High Performance Drupal is intended for people who want to further their knowledge and already have or are ready for VPS or dedicated hosting and all the power and performance options that come with that.

To be clear, I love shared hosting. Nearly all of our servers are set up in a shared hosting configuration. We just happen to know how much traffic each site is getting and what the server load is at any given time. This wouldn't be possible if we'd purchased shared hosting as a service from another company.

Agreed

BTMash's picture

As someone that loves performance and (perhaps obsessively) getting the most out of a system, there are many things that can be talked about in a high performance meetup. There are things you can do for shared hosting (while it may be limited, sometimes it is those kind of circumstances that bring out absolutely amazing and creative solutions) and there are things to watch out for that may not necessarily be limited to hardware.

I really (note: REALLY) wish I could come out to this meetup (I'm always up for sharing and learning new things related to web applications and high performance, be it drupal or otherwise). Is any of it going to be recorded or a way to share notes with those that can't make it out?

We had screen recording software

christefano's picture

We had screen recording software at the ready but there weren't any official presentations. There was a lot of lively discussion covering a wide variety of subjects:

  • SSL accelerators (and your earlier post about SSL and Drupal!)
  • a poll of who is using shared hosting (3 out of 14 attendees use shared hosting)
  • reducing excess user roles and using realms (via OG or Domain Access)
  • Solr and the desire to see a Solr lightning talk at an upcoming meetup
  • Drush and the new drush archive-dump command
  • server monitoring with Nagios, Munin and Cloudkick (the LA Drupal sites use Cloudkick)
  • Squid vs. Varnish (Varnish is much more modern and it utilizes the kernel rather than userspace)
  • Apache prefork with mod_php vs. mpm-worker with fcgid
  • Boost and how to cache files indefinitely rather than purge them when cron runs
  • workarounds for when Acquia Search shows bad search results on production sites

What did I miss?

This meetup was scheduled for 5-8pm but for most of us it went almost to 10pm (we left Venice Grind around 8:30 to go across the street to Santouka Ramen for the best-voted ramen in Southern California). To me the whole thing felt a lot like a really long Drupal After Dark. I look forward to the next one!

Sounds awesome

BTMash's picture

Feeling so jealous right now ^_~ I look forward to the next one (and booking that time so I can make it!).

Neat! What was the conclusion

wizonesolutions's picture

Neat! What was the conclusion on Apache? I wonder if my tweets sparked off that discussion or if it arose organically. Either way...what's the verdict? :)

WizOne Solutions - https://wizone.solutions - Drupal module development, theme implementation, and more
FillPDF Service - https://fillpdf.io - Hosted solution for FillPDF

NOW you tell me

mcfilms's picture

I don't consider myself a Linux God (or even a Linux demi-God) and I have 4 VPS accounts with two different hosts. And I'm not even really that smart.

Now granted, both of these hosts are "managed" to some degree. And both VPS hosting companies have helped get my bacon out of the fire in the past. But I don't think anyone should write off using a VPS.

Indeed, rather than scaring me off, Mike's comment piqued my curiosity. Since I drew the free Pantheon registration prize, I figure this might be a great get-together for me. I may be a little late, but I'll see you around 5PM.

good to hear. I soooo wish I

mike stewart's picture

good to hear. I soooo wish I could make the meetup... but am in sfbay area on spring break ;-). second time we've had this type of talk in LA, and second time I couldnt make it. :(

I definitely wasn't trying to scare anyone off.

VPS is absolutely the right solution for many companies. But I was trying to clarify that in most cases, VPS is not supported or managed -- ya, the support tickets go to you. you're on your own to figure if, and then why, the server went down. Were you hacked? is there a network outage? What is the error that caused the problem? What are the security risks introduced when you installed that software?

in my experience, most of the people in the LA community are developers, designers, builders, project managers, etc. most do not know how or want to spend their time administering a linux server. and for those reasons its my opinion that VPS is not a good fit for many of us. our clients? in cases where they take responsibility for maintenance, absolutely. with a VPS its a matter of time until "boom!" thats ok. just plan on it.

but do you really want to stop doing all your other projects in order to figure out how to bring it back live and ensure there wasn't any kind of data loss? and are you getting paid for this time?

my point: the true risks need to be understood in order to prepare.

--
mike stewart { twitter: @MediaDoneRight | IRC nick: mike stewart }

Great time!

laura s's picture

Great conversations! I found myself wishing I had my notepad.

Laura Scott
PINGV | Strategy • Design • Drupal Development

Great Meeting

Benno Sebastian's picture

This was a great meeting. Sorry we had to leave early. We defiantly have to do this more often.

post summary of topics?

Slurpee's picture

We are having a similar meetup in Chicago in June. I would love to see a summarized list of popular topics posted. Or topics which took up more time than expected?

Gnarly ;)

vmi's picture

It was my first Drupal Cafe meet n I'd be down to do this again.

Great experience

pcher1bw's picture

The small meetups are really GREAT! It really allows a lot more open discussion, and so much more information is exchanged!

I am up for this kind of meeting anytime!

One suggestion, if you plan on having a 3 hour meetup, find a place with enough 3 hour parking, several of us had to move our cars during the meetup.

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

CSUN info

pcher1bw's picture

Mike's discussion of the CSUN issues, and his lightnig talk on threads were great!

Paul Chernick
CEO
Chernick Consulting
(310) 569-2517

Drush archive export.. frowny face

craigmc's picture

Got all excited to try this out and getting
PHP Fatal error: Call to undefined function drush_export_info()

Ah well. will look into it later.

Thanks for coming out, all. Some good stuff, fersure.

Los Angeles, CA