Drupal Performance and Scalability with The Dream Team

Course Description

In this all-day workshop, top experts with years of front-line experience building large-scale Drupal deployments show you the best known practices for running fast sites for a large volume of users. Starting with a blank Linux virtual server, we will work through the setup, configuration and tuning of Drupal using Varnish, Apache, MySQL, Redis, MemcacheD and Apache Solr. Through this process, we will explain common pitfalls and how to avoid them. By the end of this course you should feel comfortable with the basics of how to setup, configure and tune your Drupal site. You’ll learn the most robust solutions the community has discovered.

Learning Objectives

We start the day with blank installs on our servers, and through lecture and exercises, tune up a highly performant Drupal environment. We discuss many of the potential pitfalls along the way to make sure you leave with a complete grasp of the tools and techniques discussed. When you depart for the day you will have your sandbox site for a limited time following the workshop, and an extensive booklet to refer to in the future.

Syllabus

Class begins at 9am, lunch is at 11:45, class ends at 5.
Before lunch we will cover (approximately) Server Side Performance, covering Apache, MySQL, XHProf, Drupal's Cache API, Redis, and MemcacheD. After lunch we will stay with the server side and continue with Drupal Core Page Caching and tips for scaling horizontally. We will then cover Client Side Performance, focusing in on CSS and JavaScript Aggregation, Express Headers and Compression.

Who will gain the most from this course?

Anyone who has to maintain a large Drupal site, as well as anyone who wants to learn more about all the different Drupal performance tricks of the trade

Prerequisites for this course

Shell experience (ssh). A basic knowledge of networking. LAMP system administration experience. PHP and Drupal development experience. Knowledge of SQL query syntax.