Offloading Drupal's work to the browser
As we have been working with a lot of high performance Drupal sites, we've gotten used to trying to make sure our Drupal doesn't do anything extra. Especially offloading the workload to the browser (w/ javascript) usually gives good results, especially when dealing with a lot of logged in users, like in a social media site.
These different techniques have now taken the shape of three Drupal 7 modules (two are out, third one will be released during the summer). We will take you through the process of making a high performance, UGC heavy Drupal site run smoothly with the help of these modules.
The now public modules are Cache Control (http://drupal.org/project/cache_control) and Front Themer (http://drupal.org/project/front_themer). We will release the third one used for caching and packing Views output into JSON later. The combination will run a very high profile Finnish site that will be released in August.