Training Details

Date: Monday, March 19, 2012
Session Time: 9:00am-6:00pm
Room: 502
Breakfast and Lunch will be provided.
Need more info? Check out the Training 101 page for more!

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.

Over the day, we'll objectively measure the improvements optimizations provide, starting with a plain Drupal-on-LAMP setup. Each participant will work on his or her own virtual machine (provided by us) to personally work through every stage of the training.

Install basic Drupal-on-LAMP (or maybe Drupal on nginx/PHP-FPM).
Add opcode caching (APC).
Add memory-based object caching (memcached or Redis).
Add reverse-proxy caching (Varnish).
Profile PHP requests (xdebug or xhprof).

Who will gain the most from this course?

Participants should have basic experience installing and using Drupal. Anyone who wants to learn how to scale Drupal.

What will you learn?

What you will learn:

• Pressflow, and Drupal performance settings
• Using Content Delivery Networks (CDN)
• Configuring Varnish
• Setting up Opcode caching with APC
• Enabling Memcache(d)
• MySQL configuration and tuning
• Setting up Apache Solr for Search
• Profiling with Xdebug and tuning your code for speed

What will you receive during the course?

We'll be setting up virtual machines for each student. Following the training, we'll provide each student with review materials that include most of the material covered over the day.

Pre-requisites for the course

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