drupal 6

These are my notes from a talk at Drupalcamp NYC in December 2011 by Sam Kottler, @samkottler on twitter and skottler on drupal.org.

Let's make the LAMP stack go "Vroom!" This is going to be a really high-level overview of performance.

Benchmarking vs Profiling

When we benchmark something, we're setting a baseline to compare against in the future. We want to say "it was this fast this long ago, and here's how we improved." Whereas profiling is telling what is fast and what is slow.

Apache

Has a lot of parameters you can set; I'll cover some basic ones.

by Irakli Nadareishvili, Director of Product Development at Phase2, @inadarei on Twitter.
Erik Summerfield, Software Developer at Phase2

You will probably have a number of contrib modules, and the queries that these modules execute can have a huge impact on the performance of your site.

Performance on the web is usually described by speed and scalability.

Speed is measured in seconds, and tells you how long it takes a single user to load a single page and all the assets that make up that page.

Team Based Drush

When you need to start from scratch, you can blow away what you have with drush site-install -y welcom

What did we really do here? You can also use drush si --yes welcom. Welcom is an installation profile that we created for this project. This command installs Drupal according to the install profile.

If one of my teammates needs a module, he can put it into the install profile file, commit it, and then when I get his commit I'll get the module too.

Drupal interacts with Solr through HTTP. Drupal sends content into the search index via XML documents. It walks through a node and there's a library that converts the node's attributes to XML, and Solr indexes the XML. Solr accepts documents POSTed to /update, and a different POST can be made to delete. Searching is done via GETs.

If you set up Solr locally (you need Java installed) the server will run at the same default port that is specified in the module, so by installing the module and enabling it, Solr should work out of the box.

Why Make Maps Beautiful?

Google has done amazing stuff with making maps on the web work well. But, Google Maps has become a bit like stock photography; it's not that exciting or novel anymore.

Part of why you want a map to be customized is to match the branding of your site, but maps are also a really powerful way of presenting information to people. The first thing that you do when you look at a map is to say "where am I on this map?" and see where you fit. Maps are a powerful way of presenting information, see the Pakistan Flood Response Map.

Use These Resources

• drupalsecurityreport.org - full white paper that discusses security for Drupal; a good resource if you are a project manager
• drupal.org/writing-secure-code
• drupal.org/security/secure-configuration
• crackingdrupal.com - great book, by greggles, webchick says its the first book about drupal that she's going to buy
  heine.familiedeelstra.com
• drupal.org/project/coder - does static analysis of your code and can show you problems like SQL injection, but it doesn't catch everything.

These are my notes from a talk given by Rich Yumul and Chris Charlton at DrupalCamp LA 2010. The first speaker was Rich, who works at Sage Tree Solutions.

My old tools for development were:

VIM + php.net + api.drupal.org

These are my notes from a talk given by Rich Yumul at DrupalCamp LA 2010. Rich is at Sage Tree Solutions.

Steps for Debugging

• Reproduce the bug in the wild
• Reproduce the bug in your development environment
• Identify where it's failling
• Identify why it's failing
• SQUASH THAT BUG

Tools

• Local dev/testing environment, MAMP or WAMP
• IDE - Netbeans or Eclipse
• XDebug/Zend Debugger
• Firebug/Webkit/IE Developer Toolbar
• tail -f, grep, less, vim, ssh

These are my notes from the talk Day To Day Site Administration Made Easy at DrupalCamp LA 2010.

Recommended Modules:

Frank Febbraro is the CTO of Phase2 and the architect of the transition of whitehouse.gov to Drupal. He gave this talk at DrupalCon San Francisco.

Due to NDAs I can't go into great detail about the things I'm presenting, but I'm happy to be able to share what I can with you guys.

Overview

Whitehouse.gov scales to lots and lots of page views. Scaling means more than adding servers and increasing page views, it means planning and processes, and growing and maturing the process of delivery. We'll be talking about infrastructure, but other stuff as well.