[consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning services?

Mon Apr 27 13:17:59 UTC 2009

I agree it would take a considerable amount of work in some cases.

But I have noticed from previous work that most server problems are due to
outright plain mistakes in queries and (mis)placement of indexes that could
be corrected quickly. I usually catch these with mtop.

In the end there's always an assessment phase to identify how much work is
ahead, then a (more) accurate price can be set based on that.

On Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 4:04 PM, Alex Urevick-Ackelsberg
<Alex at zivtech.com>wrote:

> Your scenario sounds more like a week of work to me. We often get called on
> to do this type of analysis, and it's anything but easy, espescially when
> you have lots of modules running on a server that may or may not be
> configured correctly. There's always the chance that it could be easier than
> anticipated, but I can't see how anyone in their right mind could give you
> an upfront quote for tuning a site like yours.
>
> Incidentally, I'm very curious why you assume that going through all of
> your server logs, analyzing your queries, going through "lots of modules"
> and cleaning up any messes found would take a few hours? It reminds me of
> all the people who ask us for help on a site or with a problem that tell us
> "it's really an easy site/fix", to which I always want to say: "fine, if
> it's so easy, do it yourself." Really, if it was so easy (I promise you it
> is not), would you be spending your time looking for an expert?
>
>
> --
> 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 Mon, Apr 27, 2009 at 8:44 AM, Sam Cohen <sam at samcohen.com> wrote:
>
>>
>>
>> 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
>>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
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>>
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>
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-- 
Ashraf Amayreh
http://aamayreh.org
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