I have completed a rough draft of the first chapter of "Drupal Performance and Scalability". The first chapter of this online book is divided into four sections, the first of which focuses on the importance of fully defining your performance and scalability goals, helping you to identify what you need to accomplish and how to set concrete and attainable goals. The second section discusses monitoring and measuring your ongoing progress, helping you decide what you need to monitor, and how to monitor it. The third section stresses the importance of making regular backups, discussing what needs to be backed up, and offering example scripts for backing up your entire website, including the database. Finally, the fourth section takes an in depth look at using revision control tools to manage your website, providing useful recipes showing how Git can track changes to your website, helping you update to new releases and push those updates into production.
It is important to realize that this is a rough draft, and as such it may contain spelling or grammatical errors, it may be missing key points, and the writing style may not be very polished. However, the book has to start somewhere, and this is the first step toward the end goal of publishing a useful and freely available online resource. I welcome all criticisms, suggestions and feedback. If you find errors in the text or have specific comments, you can help with this writing project by posting your feedback on the appropriate page. The current status of this project is tracked here.
I do not intend to keep writing the book in the order of the chapters, and have not yet decided which chapter I will focus on next. Very likely instead of writing a complete second chapter, I will next work through the entire outline and add notes to each chapter that will prove useful in the future writing. However it works out, I will continue to maintain the book online where anyone can track and review the progress, providing feedback. My hope is that as the book evolves more people will get involved in the editing process.
Currently I have only published a version that can be read online. I have been reviewing tools that will automatically convert this book into a PDF, and hope to soon begin making a downloadable version available to allow offline reading of the book.