Jeremy Andrews

Drupal Performance and Scalability

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...

Jeremy Andrews

Giving Back

Tag1 Consulting is focused on improving Drupal's performance and scalability. We also believe that when information is freely shared, everyone wins. Toward these ends, we are working on an online book titled, " Drupal Performance and Scalability". The book is divided into five main sections, Drupal Performance, Front End Performance, Improved Caching and Searching, Optimizing the Database Layer, and Drupal In The Cloud. The book is primarily aimed toward users running Drupal on the LAMP...

Jeremy Andrews

Benchmarking Search

SearchBench has received a couple of useful updates since yesterday's initial cloud tests. It can generate search queries based on actual content, and it can export search benchmark results. In gaining these features, it is now possible to use SearchBench to perform some actual performance comparisons. Once again I set up these tests on an extra large EC2 instance. I still have not performed any tuning, and I continue to test Drupal 5 core search...

Jeremy Andrews

Benchmarking Search

I ran some initial Drupal search benchmarks with SearchBench on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. These first tests were primarily focused on confirming that SearchBench and EC2 are a good match. They utilized a single server instance, and did not include any server tuning. I used the devel module to create 5,000 random nodes and 10,000 random comments. I indexed this content both with Drupal's core search module, and with the contributed Xapian module. I then...

Jeremy Andrews

Benchmarking Search

There have been some ongoing scalability issues affecting Drupal.org's built in search functionality for some time now. Less interested in outsourcing search to a big black box such as Google, I spent some time helping clean up the Xapian module, making it possible to completely replace Drupal's built in SQL-powered search functionality with a Xapian powered engine. With the basic search functionality complete, there was still a need to actually compare the performance of the...

Eric Searcy

Tag1 Consulting
This week the Tag1 website got a new face. Notable is the new logo in the upper-left, as well the matching theme. Feel free to post your feedback as comments to this post. This was my first go at Drupal theming (I started from an existing theme---not from scratch!) and it was fairly intuitive. However, I ran into a some issues that my web design colleagues constantly gripe about, as well as ones I wasn't...

Eric Searcy

IPVS High-Availability

Continuing my plans to set up an IPVS high-availability LAMP stack on EC2, I needed to add the kernel modules for IPVS. I have been using the CentOS machine images provided by RightScale, which have unneeded services disabled and, although they are set up to work with RightScale's software, work very well for general use. Unfortunately, the IPVS kernel modules are not among those pre-installed on the AMI. I might have expected a simple kernel...

Jeremy Andrews

Open Source Advertising

The Ad Bard Network was conceived because I have a need for relevant, non-obnoxious advertisements on my website, KernelTrap.org. I have maintained KernelTrap for many years, as a hobby in my spare time, and as a way to stay involved in the open source world. I enjoy this hobby, but it requires a lot of time and commitment keeping the website updated every day. I've long dreamed of finding a way to make a little...

Eric Searcy

In The Cloud

This last week I've had the fortune to have some spare time to play around with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I'm pretty interested in the potential for scaling the LAMP stack by having a programmable cluster at the service of your box. A lot of the documentation I find seems to be by people either scaling via dynamic DNS additions when they add more nodes, or by using EC2 nodes as application servers used...

Jeremy Andrews

Cloud Computing

With all the excitement surrounding cloud computing, and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Beta service, I decided it was time to give it a try myself. Without much personal background in the new service, I found that there are an overwhelming number of pages talking about EC2, and even Drupal on EC2, but didn't locate a simple guide to quickly get me up and running. Having now spent a few hours today learning the...