[drupal-devel] Drupal performance testing

[Kieran Lal]

Hello, we, Trellon and CivicSpace Labs,  are doing Drupal performance  
testing for a client.  We will be sharing the results with the  
community.  We identified three areas to focus on for performance  
testing.

1) First we would like to reduce the memory requirements of running  
Drupal so that we can run more Apache processes.
-Please advise if there are particular configurations of Drupal that  
you recommend to reduce memory usage.
-Are there particular contributed modules that we should avoid  
because of memory issues.  We are looking at flexinode, event,  
location, and event finder, as well as organic groups.
We are looking at Robert Douglas and Mike Gifford work on memory  
profiling:  http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/ 
sandbox/robertdouglass/profiler/, and http://lists.drupal.org/ 
archives/drupal-devel/2005-08/msg00314.html
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2005-08/msg00347.html
http://lists.drupal.org/archives/drupal-devel/2005-08/msg00344.html

2) We would like implement a better caching strategy.  We are aware  
of several implementations.  Once the site becomes an active  
community of posters caching become less useful.
-We are planning on using Jeremy Andrews caching patch for testing.
-We would welcome other suggestions.

3)MySQL specific optimizations-  John Paul Ashenfelter is a very  
experienced performance tuner and is heading up the scalability project.
-We are interesed in MySQL cache optimizations.
-In particular MySQL replication topologies as well as using the  
Memory table type for some of the problematic data.
-If you have experience tuning large or high performance sites with  
MySQL we would appreciate your insight.

We are looking at results from RPMs that have been turned for  
scalability and security as defined here: http://www.sourcelabs.com/ 
SourceLabsApacheMySQLPHPTestResults.pdf.  This tells us that our  
limitations are processors for PHP support and RAM for MySQL support  
in the testing environment.

As always we need technical savvy people who can help with  
documentation or are willing to help produce diagrams to prove to  
potential users that Drupal can scale.

Your help and comments are appreciated.

Kieran