Beat the devil: towards a Drupal performance benchmark

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

Transcript

1. towards a Drupal performance benchmark Beat the Devil
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. keep everything as close as possible to production test systems
32. take advantage of configuration management to reproduce your live infrastructure test systems
33. some software has its performance directly tied to the number of cores and/or the amount of RAM test systems
34. sacred cow of frontend CDN (expiration logic) cloud servers
35. number of req. / parallelization blocking events data side: DNS resolution data side: download time data side: size / weight order matters frontend vs backend
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. anonymous vs registered cacheable vs non cacheable backend: static vs dynamic
39. ab Jmeter Httperf wrk Gatling TCP copy HTTP benchmarking tools
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. locks difficult to dissect devel dynamic processing vs data gather
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. https://tools.percona.com/ Percona toolkit [*] (formerly maat-kit) tcpdump + Percona toolkit Logs are vital! Every engine has strongs & weakness Better on bare metal! MySQL Tune & Benchmarking tools
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. Drupal known issues (DB): Watchdog, sessions, accesslog... history... Please do stress, load & stability tests regularly in your live system extra balls:
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."