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By theatereleven on
Hey forum - I'm not being lazy. I've done a freaking large amount of reading this past week on a couple forums (including this one) about performance tweaking Drupal/Linux installations. Have made tweaks ranging from MySQL my.cnf configuration to installing monitoring software like Munin. I've read a variety of things from using servers different than Apache, use Boost, don't use Boost, install APC for PHP, ETC.
So....all that aside, if you are using a Linux distribution to run your Drupal site, I want to know what changes you've made to make Drupal FAST. And yes, I know it depends on the site and the traffic, blah, blah, blah. No disclaimers here. Just state your site function, and then your tip. It will help me and hordes of other Drupal newbies out there.
And let me say THANK YOU ahead of time. Oh...and for you other Drupal newbies, don't screw around with shared hosting. I just moved my site to a VPS from www.linode.com and they rock. ROCK. Freaking awesome. And even if you don't understand Linux, their guides are very in-depth and will walk you through most of the steps. You'll still spend some time figuring things out, but their support is very, very fast.
Okay, enough said. Please let the posting begin!
My first tip for newbies (and this isn't performance related, but will save you time): if you're installing a Drupal 6.x site and want to use Ubuntu, use 8.04 LTS. If you install the latest stable release it comes with PHP 5.3 and guess what? Yep, Drupal 6.x isn't always cool with PHP 5.3.
Comments
I moved to linode
Hello,
I recently moved to linode 512 using Ubuntu 10.04. I have to admit that Drupal is fast, very fast. Coming from shared hosting, I will never look back and I agree with you when you saw don't waste your time with shared hosting.
Yes, shared hosting is cheap but it is not meant for Drupal (in my opinion). I was wasting my time troubleshooting and it was hard not having root access.
Being a neewb with this environment I had to read a lot of Ubuntu books and reading the forums. Overwhelming at first. I have minimum config setup using 256MB(swap) 8GB HD. I had to set the php memory limit to 256MB, I was getting WSD on views and this solved that problem.
The only issue I ran across was memory was at 90% and made things a bit slow, then I came across this from their site http://library.linode.com/troubleshooting/memory-networking. I followed their suggestions and that fixed that problem.
I am not using Boost but have installed APC and using Php 5.3. So far no issues yet using 6.X
Overall. I would recommend Linode. Even though I am paying 2x as much compared to shared hosting, it is very much worth it.
Next on my list is installing Red5 and FFMPEG.
Mark
High Performance Group
http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance
2 wiki's for performance modules
Frontend: http://groups.drupal.org/node/57563
Backend: http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897
The modules I use for performance tuning:
http://drupal.org/project/dbtuner
http://drupal.org/project/devel
I use boost; give the latest dev a spin, it's gotten much better with handling views & panels caching and expiration.