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, Pressflow, Apache, MySQL, Memcache 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

Following the training, participants will be able to install Drupal with a best-practices stack, including reverse-proxy caching, database tuning, object caching in memory, and opcode caching. Participants will be able to perform code profiling and basic load testing.

MySQL configuration and tuning
Setting up Apache Solr for Search
Profiling with Xdebug and tuning your code for speed

Pre-Requisites

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

Audience

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.