[consulting] Does anyone offer Drupal performance tuning services?

[joe.murray at jmaconsulting.biz]

Having sat through a Drupal performance tuning session Khalid ran at a
Toronto Drupal Camp and seeing his participation on different lists, I
have no trouble recommending him as a very knowledgeable consultant in
this area. It's true that when I tried to set up one of my clients with
him, they balked at the cost, but that's because sometimes you can do a
bit of easy stuff yourself or via you vps hosting sysadmins, and you can
up your hardware a fair bit to cover off many untuned settings.

I also think you're expectations need to be managed regarding what is
possible in a couple of hours. Tuning requires determining what the
problem is by instrumenting the code/site, letting it run either in
production or on a specially set up test server under load, then analyzing
the results to see where changes should be made. It takes time to do this
preliminary work in order to provide realistic advice, with associated
costing.

As for easy things that you probably already know, I've found that
ensuring PHP has enough memory is important (especially for my sites
running Drupal with CiviCRM module, which needs 128Mb), that the vps has
enough memory so that it doesn't start churning when memory starts getting
swapped out to virtual memory on disk, that the hosting company isn't
overselling and putting too many VPSes on the same server (using a
reputable, higher cost host, or one with guaranteed CPU time like
RimuHosting semi-dedicated plans helps there), and adjusting a few
settings for MySQL so that it is appropriate for Drupal can make a big
difference (for a highlight of what Sun/MySQL are expecting to do in 5.4
in terms of default settings, see
http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-5.4-features/en/variables-options.html).

Joe Murray
JMA Consulting