Slides from the session we (@perusio @rodricels @NITEMAN_es) gave on Drupal Developer Days Barcelona 2012: http://barcelona2012.drupaldays.org/sessions/beat-devil-towards-drupal-performance-benchmark

1. Beat the Devil
towards a Drupal performance benchmark

2. http://drupal.org/user/770300
@rodricels
http://drupal.org/user/8859
@perusio
http://drupal.org/user/39078
@NITEMAN_es

3. We'll kill a lot of sacred
cows

5. the murder weapon
will be
Occam's razor

6. which amounts to the
principle of least effort

7. laziness is good

8. hopefully in the end you'll
be puzzled

9. good things happen to
puzzled people who
obsess

10. simplest
laziest
easiest

11. performance is for
everyone

12. do you have
performance issues?

13. system thinking
http://www.flickr.com/photos/irisheyes/148134965/sizes/o/in/photostream/

14. mathematics is
for everyone

15. request per second
vs
seconds per request

16. MTTR
Mean Time To
Recovery
vs
MTBF
Mean Time Between
Failure

17. do you monitor live
system
performance?

18. live monitoring tools
Munin
Cacti

19. drupal accesslog table
has tons of useful data

20. beware the logs
logstash / graylog
aggregate them

21. economics
costs per
request/volume/peek
operational costs
Return On Investment

22. we're talking about $peed
$peed = cost_effective_performance

23. slowness
downtime
operations
costs you money

24. it's not the
tools you have
it's the use you
make of them

25. have you benchmarked
your Drupal?

26. complex is easy and fragile
simple is hard and resilient
Keep It Simple Stupid

27. Know your stack
Know your targets
Monitor your performance

28. find where the problems are
don't fix things that aren't broken
the worse the first
one change a time
&
keep a log of your actions

29. dissecting
frontend vs backend
backend
static vs dynamic
dynamic
processing vs data gather

30. beyond development &
operations
good developers are those that take
all aspects in consideration

31. test systems
keep everything as close as
possible to production

32. test systems
take advantage of
configuration management
to reproduce your live
infrastructure

33. test systems
some software has its
performance directly
tied to the number of cores
and/or
the amount of RAM

34. sacred cow of frontend
CDN (expiration logic)
cloud servers

35. frontend vs backend
number of req. / parallelization
blocking events
data side: DNS resolution
data side: download time
data side: size / weight
order matters

36. frontend vs backend tools
Firebug
Chrome tools
Google Speed Tracer
Yslow
Web services [*] [*] [*] [*]

37. sacred cow of backend
load balancing: how? failover strategy?
more webheads: cache consistency?
another server: what for?

38. backend: static vs dynamic
anonymous vs registered
cacheable vs non cacheable

39. HTTP benchmarking tools
ab
Jmeter
Httperf
wrk
Gatling
TCP copy

40. sacred cow of PHP
HipHop (hacked libs)
PHP Extensions (C / PECL)

41. sacred cow of PHP
APC Tuning
profile, profile, profile and profile
upgrading PHP version (if you're brave)

42. dynamic
processing vs data gather
locks
difficult to dissect
devel

43. benchmarking / profiling PHP
Xdebug
Webgrind
Xhprof
don't even try without an
opcode cache
& remember the hard disk

44. sacred cow of databases
NoSQL
denormalization
sharding
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rebeccaselah/3942904359/sizes/l/in/photostream/

45. sacred cow of databases
NoSQL => helps with writes
denormalization => helps with HUGE DBs
sharding => helps with Big DBs

46. MySQL Tune & Benchmarking
tools
https://tools.percona.com/
Percona toolkit [*] (formerly maat-kit)
tcpdump + Percona toolkit
Logs are vital!
Every engine has strongs & weakness
Better on bare metal!

47. root hardware causes
network & DNS play a role
static content depends mainly on I/O
dynamic content (php) depends on CPU
database server mainly depends on RAM

48. extra balls:
Drupal known issues (DB): Watchdog, sessions,
accesslog... history...
Please do stress, load & stability tests regularly
in your live system

49. This is our way, what is
yours?
(no cows were harmed in the making of this
presentation)

50. ¿Questions?
Pablo Picasso [speaking of computers]:
"But they are useless. They can only give you
answers."