[consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning services?

[Domenic Santangelo]

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 8:34 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
> I'm not looking for a large shop that will charge thousands of dollars for
> this service, but a consultant who has expertise in this area and would
> charge fair market value for a few hours of their time.

Whoever you end up is going to have to do some hardcore expectation
management with you. A couple hours may be enough time to look through
and tweak some basic things and perhaps write up some areas that seem
like bottlenecks for you to take a look at on your own. What's unclear
to me is:

1) What are the pain points that prompted you to want performance work
done? Be specific: "homepage load time 4x slower for logged-in users
than for anonymous" etc

2) Given your answers to #1, what are your metrics of success? What
could this person you hire address (in terms of what you said in #1)
in order for you to be satisfied?


> charging somewhere in $50 to $100 an hour range, and in just a couple of
> hours they should be able to accomplish quite a lot for a site.

I don't know what specifically it is you're looking for so this may be
premature, but I want to prepare you for reality: a "couple hours"
will probably get you close to nothing in terms of usable results
unless something is critically misconfigured right now. Otherwise what
you'll (probably) end up with is a couple simple things done (opcode
cache installed, Apache configuration optimization) and a list of
things you should do ASAP. Keep in mind, stack performance is greatly
dependent on the application running on it. I run all the sites I
develop on my local box, with the same configuration, all on Drupal
and I think all on D5 right now -- and some pageload in <1 sec and
some in >8 sec. Same stack, same CMS framework, it's the application.

Anyway, just kind of rambling on a Sunday now. Let us know what your
answers are and maybe we can point you in a good direction.

-D