[consulting] consulting Digest, Vol 39, Issue 19

Michael Barton bartonfreelance at gmail.com
Mon Apr 27 13:10:59 UTC 2009 

I'll give you 2 hours of my time for a small investment of $60 USD.

801-787-3237, available after 5pm EST.

Thanks,

Michael



On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:45 AM, <consulting-request at drupal.org> wrote:

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> Today's Topics:
>
>   1. Re: Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning   services?
>      (Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg)
>   2. Re: Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning   services?
>      (Domenic Santangelo)
>   3. Re: Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning   services?
>      (Sam Cohen)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 15:03:43 -0400
> From: Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg <Alex at ZivTech.com>
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning
>        services?
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting
>        providers"      <consulting at drupal.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <37b3830e0904261203y6795eb22n8459a185c445ff01 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> Like Greg said, if you can find someone willing to do this for a flat fee,
> then I'd love to hear more about it. As far as I can tell, there are far
> too
> many variables to make it possible to estimate accurately up front. If I
> were trying to figure out a fixed price I'd personally try to think about
> what the highest possible price could be, and then charge that price.
> Otherwise, you are asking the consultant to take a considerable financial
> risk.
>
> As Khalid mentioned, many shops that handle scaling will offer you more of
> a
> fixed price if they control the servers, which seems reasonable.
>
> I, for one, think that you are seriously undervaluing server and general
> LAMP stack support, but maybe I'm not understanding what you are looking
> for. What do you mean by, for example, "Load Balancing"? That makes it seem
> to me that you are talking about scaling a site that requires more than one
> server, but given the budgets you seem to be working with, that doesn't
> seem
> like a good assumption (someone who requires more than one server should be
> able to afford to pay market rates to get it done correctly).
>
> So, my question is: what exactly are the problems that you are facing that
> require a server/scaling specialist?
>
> --
> Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
> ZivTech, LLC
> http://zivtech.com
> alex at zivtech.com
> office: (267) 940-7737
> cell: (215) 866-8956
> skype: zivtech
> aim: zivtech
>
>
> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
>
> > Thanks Greg,
> >
> > I understand there are a lot of firms offering this service, but what I'm
> > really hoping for is someone who had a deep understanding of server and
> > performance issues and can spend a couple of hours analyzing a site and
> > making adjustments.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > By flat rate, I mean a willingness to give a price upfront based on the
> > site specs and hosting situation.
> >
> > Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that someone with this expertise, might
> be
> > 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.
> >
> > This would be a really valuable service for those of us in the biz who
> > might be very knowledgeable in other areas but don't know much about
> > servers, bottlenecks, load balance, etc -- and don't really want to learn
> > either.
> >
> > Thanks,
> > Sam
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Greg Knaddison <
> > Greg at growingventuresolutions.com> wrote:
> >
> >> We hit this topic less than a month ago -
> >> http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/2009-March/003088.html
> >>
> >> And read the followups as well.
> >>
> >> Also, charging for performance tuning as a flat rate is pretty
> >> interesting.  If you find anyone who takes that arrangement please
> >> write back to the list about the experience.
> >>
> >> Regards,
> >> Greg
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
> >> > Does anyone out there offer a Drupal performance site and server
> tuning
> >> > service -- for a flat rate?
> >> >
> >> > Ideally this would include analyzing a site, making changes to the
> site
> >> and
> >> > server as needed in order to improve performance.
> >> >
> >> > I think this service would probably be useful to a lot of us, but I
> >> > understand there's that concern about sharing rates over an email
> list,
> >> so
> >> > please email me privately with what you would include and what you
> would
> >> > charge for such a service.
> >> >
> >>
> >>
> >> --
> >> Greg Knaddison
> >> http://knaddison.com | 303-800-5623 |
> http://growingventuresolutions.com
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> consulting mailing list
> >> consulting at drupal.org
> >> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
> >>
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > consulting mailing list
> > consulting at drupal.org
> > http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
> >
> >
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> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 2
> Date: Sun, 26 Apr 2009 14:04:03 -0700
> From: Domenic Santangelo <domenic at workhabit.com>
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning
>        services?
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting
>        providers"      <consulting at drupal.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <e83e0db0904261404g77a40aech4536635ba5dbfdd4 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1
>
> 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
>
>
> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 3
> Date: Mon, 27 Apr 2009 08:44:43 -0400
> From: Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com>
> Subject: Re: [consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning
>        services?
> To: "A list for Drupal consultants and Drupal service/hosting
>        providers"      <consulting at drupal.org>
> Message-ID:
>        <a0b404fa0904270544s63a36242u2e4bc40d11bbed95 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1"
>
> On Sun, Apr 26, 2009 at 3:03 PM, Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
> <Alex at zivtech.com>wrote:
>
> > Like Greg said, if you can find someone willing to do this for a flat
> fee,
> > then I'd love to hear more about it. As far as I can tell, there are far
> too
> > many variables to make it possible to estimate accurately up front. If I
> > were trying to figure out a fixed price I'd personally try to think about
> > what the highest possible price could be, and then charge that price.
> > Otherwise, you are asking the consultant to take a considerable financial
> > risk.
> >
> > As Khalid mentioned, many shops that handle scaling will offer you more
> of
> > a fixed price if they control the servers, which seems reasonable.
> >
> > I, for one, think that you are seriously undervaluing server and general
> > LAMP stack support, but maybe I'm not understanding what you are looking
> > for. What do you mean by, for example, "Load Balancing"? That makes it
> seem
> > to me that you are talking about scaling a site that requires more than
> one
> > server, but given the budgets you seem to be working with, that doesn't
> seem
> > like a good assumption (someone who requires more than one server should
> be
> > able to afford to pay market rates to get it done correctly).
> >
> > So, my question is: what exactly are the problems that you are facing
> that
> > require a server/scaling specialist?
> >
>
>
>
> The scenario here is a D6 site on a VPS with a lot of modules that is quite
> sluggish.  What I'd hope someone can accomplish in a  couple of hours would
> be to analyze all server and software configs to see if anything can be
> installed or tweaked to improve performance.  This might include MySQL,
> PHP,
> Apache settings -- or even if there's any unecessary software on the VPS
> than can be disabled or tweaked. And installing anything that might help.
> There's a lot of information out there on ways to do this yourself, but I'd
> rather hire someone who knows what they are doing to take care of it.  I'd
> also like them, if it's possible, to be able to test the VPS to make sure
> that it's performing as well as it should be.
>
> As for the site, I imagine that this person can use devel module to analyze
> the query queue and perhaps make some suggestions -- maybe there's a poorly
> written module that's eating up a lot of resources.  Maybe there's a
> caching module I overlooked.  Maybe there's alternate approaches to getting
> the job done that wouldn't use as many resources.
>
> It seems to me someone should be able to accomplish a lot in these two
> areas
> in a few hours -- and it would be a great service I'd love to be able to
> offer to my clients.
>
> (As for load balancing, my thinking there was with regard to a managed
> dedicated server I run that has about 30 drupal sites. My thinking was that
> such a person might know ways to install software that would allow me to
> balance the load so that one site wouldn't be using up more resources -- or
> at least help me analyze what resources each site is using.)
>
> Maybe I'm wrong, but it does seem like for a fixed rate for a few hours
> someone who knows what they are doing should be able to accomplish a lot
> and
> make recommendations for going forward.  It would also be nice to have such
> a person available as a site grows and if it needs to scale.
>
> Thanks,
> Sam
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> >
> > --
> > Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
> > ZivTech, LLC
> > http://zivtech.com
> > alex at zivtech.com
> > office: (267) 940-7737
> > cell: (215) 866-8956
> > skype: zivtech
> > aim: zivtech
> >
> >
> >
> > On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 11:34 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
> >
> >> Thanks Greg,
> >>
> >> I understand there are a lot of firms offering this service, but what
> I'm
> >> really hoping for is someone who had a deep understanding of server and
> >> performance issues and can spend a couple of hours analyzing a site and
> >> making adjustments.
> >>
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> By flat rate, I mean a willingness to give a price upfront based on the
> >> site specs and hosting situation.
> >>
> >> Perhaps I'm wrong, but it seems that someone with this expertise, might
> be
> >> 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.
> >>
> >> This would be a really valuable service for those of us in the biz who
> >> might be very knowledgeable in other areas but don't know much about
> >> servers, bottlenecks, load balance, etc -- and don't really want to
> learn
> >> either.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Sam
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 10:43 AM, Greg Knaddison <
> >> Greg at growingventuresolutions.com> wrote:
> >>
> >>> We hit this topic less than a month ago -
> >>> http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/consulting/2009-March/003088.html
> >>>
> >>> And read the followups as well.
> >>>
> >>> Also, charging for performance tuning as a flat rate is pretty
> >>> interesting.  If you find anyone who takes that arrangement please
> >>> write back to the list about the experience.
> >>>
> >>> Regards,
> >>> Greg
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Fri, Apr 24, 2009 at 8:17 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
> >>> > Does anyone out there offer a Drupal performance site and server
> tuning
> >>> > service -- for a flat rate?
> >>> >
> >>> > Ideally this would include analyzing a site, making changes to the
> site
> >>> and
> >>> > server as needed in order to improve performance.
> >>> >
> >>> > I think this service would probably be useful to a lot of us, but I
> >>> > understand there's that concern about sharing rates over an email
> list,
> >>> so
> >>> > please email me privately with what you would include and what you
> >>> would
> >>> > charge for such a service.
> >>> >
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> --
> >>> Greg Knaddison
> >>> http://knaddison.com | 303-800-5623 |
> http://growingventuresolutions.com
> >>> _______________________________________________
> >>> consulting mailing list
> >>> consulting at drupal.org
> >>> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
> >>>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> consulting mailing list
> >> consulting at drupal.org
> >> http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
> >>
> >>
> >
> > _______________________________________________
> > consulting mailing list
> > consulting at drupal.org
> > http://lists.drupal.org/mailman/listinfo/consulting
> >
> >
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>
> End of consulting Digest, Vol 39, Issue 19
> ******************************************
>
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