Tag1 Consulting, Inc.

LAMP Performance and Scalability Experts

With success as the only option, choose Tag1, an organization committed to your success.

Tag1 Consulting, Inc, specializes in performance and scalability tuning of the entire LAMP stack, which is Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP. We also specialize in Drupal, opcode caches, memcached, load balancers, integration with content delivery networks, network security, searching, and infrastructure design and deployment. Contact us.

Scalable Linux Clusters with LVS, Part I

Whether you are perusing mailing lists or reading the large LVS-HOWTO, much of the available information on creating a high-availability Linux cluster can be difficult to sift through. Relevant information shares space with implementation details dating back to version 2.0 of the Linux kernel and comments that are often ambiguous at best.

This two-part article attempts to present an up-to-date tutorial on setting up LVS for your network, with an emphasis on designing a system that matches your infrastructure’s needs.

MySQL Engines: MyISAM vs. InnoDB

Why use InnoDB?

InnoDB is commonly viewed as anything but performant, especially when compared to MyISAM. Many actually call it slow. This view is mostly supported by old facts and mis-information. In reality, you would be very hard-pressed to find a current, production-quality MySQL Database Engine with the CPU efficiency of InnoDB. It has its performance "quirks" and there are definitely workloads for which it is not optimal, but for standard OLTP (Online Transaction Processing) loads, it is tough to find a better, safer fit.

Drupal Creator Praises Tag1 Consulting

We are honored to have received praise from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, who said in his blog (emphasis added):

"It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. [...] Either you can do all of the above yourself, or you outsource it to a company that knows how to do this for you. Both are non-trivial and I can count the number of truly qualified companies on one hand. Tag1 Consulting is one of the few Drupal companies that excel at this, in case you're wondering."

Improving Page Load Times

There are a number of ways to improve the amount of time it takes visitors to load your Drupal powered web site.

InnoDB Performance Tuning

InnoDB is a transaction-safe, ACID compliant MySQL storage engine. It has commit, rollback, and crash recovery capabilities, and offers row level locking. The engine's overview page explains, “InnoDB has been designed for maximum performance when processing large data volumes. Its CPU efficiency is probably not matched by any other disk-based relational database engine.”