drupal performance issues

I am looking to partner with someone in the hosting sector, or perhaps a Drupal shop with performance-sensitive clients. The idea is to productize my prototype and ideas for a very high performance Drupal server appliance. Move out of the cloud and stay close to the metal!
I bring years of high performance computing experience to the table, you know the business side and have client relationships. Together we'll revolutionize Drupal servers. Contact me at cwebersd (at) google (dot) com if interested.

Dear Drupal community,

We would like some advice and maybe further collaborations regarding a Drupal-based project, specifically concerning performance issues.

I work for New Relic. As Dries pointed out last week on his blog, http://buytaert.net/playing-with-new-relic-on-acquia-hosting we now have a Drupal performance management service available. You can use it to see where Drupal is slow... and you can track the problem down using real production data. We are currently looking for people willing to try out our latest agent in High Performance Drupal environments. check us out http://newrelic.com/php-app-performance.html - we want feedback from the community about our instrumentation.

Hitting any link or doing any operation on the site and Top shows the server using 95 to 100% of the CPU to serve the www-data.

Firstly I am not a developer, I am just a photographer with an idea for a site, which because I couldn't find any local cms developers who would build it on Drupal, I started learning on my own. For the moment this is not about high performance, its about ANY performance!

Hi,

The short story: I just completed a project for a client. I put it online and 5 min later when the wave of people arrive the server is unreachable. Do I have the wrong server?

And now the details.

I have a dedicated server:
Intel® Celeron® 1.8 GHz, 1GB RAM
CentOS 5, Apache 2.2.3, MySQL 5, PHP 5.1.6
drupal 6.11 with a handful modules enabled
My site has moderate number of nodes (in the thousands).

The only enabled modules which are significant are "views" and CCK.

There seems to be some issues with the broadcast function, or maybe I've lost permission to do so. I've tried 5x to broadcast everyone to remind them of the meetup, as well as contact individuals through the site, but the broadcast doesn't seem to be working, and I get an access denied on other users' contact forms. If you can make contact, please remind a friend!

Hey Drupalers!

Hey,

I've recently been put up against the huge task of scaling a large drupal site, tuning servers and the database.

Lets use this space to discuss performance issues that anyone has come up with and solutions you've found for this.

Starters for discussions:

PHP Accelerators : Which one to use and when?

Caching Techniques : Drupal Cache, Squid, Memcache

Database Optimization : MySql variables, InnoDB vs. MyISAM

Apache Tuning

What else?