[support] Improving performance

[Dan Kegel]

On Fri, Jan 3, 2014 at 6:30 AM, Jamie Holly <hovercrafter at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The high performance group on drupal.org is really good:
>
> https://groups.drupal.org/high-performance

I'd post there, but its spam filter doesn't like me.

> The most common recipe is APC for opcode caching, memcache for object
> caching and Drupal's database to cache the form table.

The Drupal 6 site I'm rescuing (and I've never used Drupal before, what
a way to get started!) was failing before I came on the scene, and
had response times like this after each of my tweaks (measured
with   ab -n 20 -c 1 repeated three times right on the same machine
as the web server, and page caching disabled):

fix             median response time for logged in session after fixing problem
MaxClients=5  3300ms
simple APC     3000ms
mysql QC        2300ms

so I heartily recommend turning on APC and MySQL query caching
based on my five minutes of experience with them.

Performance for anonymous users isn't too bad, thanks to 'moderate
page caching'.
I'd like to try block cache but it can't be enabled, presumably
because Content Access is used.
I'd never heard of views cache or panels cache, thanks.

I'm trying authcache now, but it doesn't seem to be helping; a
tutorial there would
be helpful, but I haven't found a good one yet.  Any suggestions?
- Dan