Dummy content and common gotchas

Setting up a performance testing environment

Benchmarking is best done on your local computer or in a dedicated testing environment so that you can eliminate the possibility of network traffic and other factors that might bias the results.

Following Dries's recommendations, we're going to setup an environment with:

* 2,000 users
* 5,000 nodes
* 5,000 path aliases
* 10,000 comments
* 250 terms
* 15 vocabularies

Download a copy of Devel module to get its handy devel_generate.module. Note that since HEAD can be volatile, always check the issue queue for updated patches.

Browse your site to /admin and use the 'Generate content' links to generate the sample data outlined above.

Notes

* You should disable MySQL query caching. Run this query:
SET GLOBAL query_cache_size = 0;
* You should also disable PHP debugger plugins.