pressflow

I want to give everyone a preview of what we're working on for Mercury 1.1:

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Announcing Wild Pockets Gallery Beta

I'm having trouble with a Pressflow install and its lazy session handling.

The issue
Anonymous page views are still getting a session cookie and thus the Cache-Control:max-age header is being set to 0, making it difficult to have Varnish cache pages.

Lately, I've been having some performance issues on a high traffic Drupal 5 site I maintain. Eventually, I'd like to get on Pressflow 6 with Varnish and Memcache, but as an interim step I decided to drop PF5 on our staging site to see what would happen. As it's supposed to be drop in drop out compatible, it seemed worth a shot. After doing some JMeter performance testing, it looked like there were marginal gains to be had with just PF over stock Drupal. Everything seemed ok, so I decided to push to production while I installed Varnish on the staging site and got into configuring it there. That's where my problems began.

I've got a pretty stable Mercury instance running (I forget which version). I've not got any production sites on it though I do plan to leverage a Mercury box for that soon.

On this box I have a strange quirk that I can't seem to figure out. If I've not loaded a page for several hours it sends me output of the home page in a /node format instead of the node I've set for the home page. Hit refresh and it does what it's supposed to do.

I was not sure where to post this question. Appologies if this is not the correct place.

I've been looking at PressFlow and it looks nice that it already comes packaged with several performance related patches. Thanks to those who made it available.

However, compared to latest Drupal snapshot, it seems to be missing latest Drupal core patches. If this happens with minor fixes it's ok, but it seems it could also happen with security related issues?

I recently saw someone post in regards to seeing a significant speed boost by switching to PressFlow's "enhanced/streamlined" version of Drupal.

However some googling and reading revealed no benchmarks on how much faster it is on average. Does anyone know how much of a speed gain we're talking about?

For comparison: The number I've seen tossed around for PHP accelerators is 15% for more complex sites.

I've just released two modules for developers and maintainers of performance-intensive sites. The first module provides a new, self-tuning, preemptive cache API for modules. It's called PressFlow Preempt. The second module (named PressFlow Preempt Panels) builds on the first by seamlessly offering cached versions of Panels.