Wednesday's User Group Meeting (Extreme Drupal Performance + KentuckyDerby.com + Location/Maps)

Hey everyone,

Just a friendly reminder that this WEDNESDAY (June 8) is the date of our monthly Portland Drupal User Group Meeting.

Here's what we've got on the agenda:

1. "A Million Pageviews an Hour: Extreme Drupal Performance" presented by Aaron Longwell

The Kentucky Derby is the most watched horse racing event in the world. It's frequently called "the most exciting two minutes in sports," and is nationally televised on 3 different networks and simulcast worldwide. All that excitement results in www.kentuckyderby.com, the race's official Drupal-powered web site receiving more than 1 million page views in less than an hour.

Presented by Aaron Longwell, Chief Technologist at Culture Foundry, this presentation will cover the hardware, software, Drupal modifications and extensions that enabled the site to serve every one of those pages with sub-200ms response times. In particular, Aaron's talk will discuss helpful Drupal modules, Varnish, HTTP in-browser caching, load balancing, redundancy, load testing, Pressflow, Amazon Web Services, and Capistrano--and how each played a part in the Kentucky Derby site.

Even small sites with little traffic can benefit from many of the techniques and technologies Aaron will be discussing. The talk will be relatively technical in nature (there will even be a bit of code) but even non-developers should learn something about the principles behind super high performance web sites.

2. "Location + Maps: Making it Actually Work" presented by Katrin Silvius

In her recent work, Katrin Silvius, senior web developer at One Economy, has discovered all sorts of bugs and workarounds necessary to make location and maps work well together in Drupal. Katrin will discuss some of the things she's learned from her work and we'll open up the discussion to other developers about best practices and nagging problems with implementing location and maps in Drupal.

Finally, here are the meeting details:

Date: Wednesday, June 8
Time: 6:00 - 7:30 p.m. (after the meeting, we head to Lucky Lab for drinks and conversation!)
Location: OpenSourcery offices (1636 NW Lovejoy St. Portland, OR 97209)

It promises to be really interesting and fun meeting... you don't want to miss it!

See you there,
Ben