Still reporting from DrupalCon. So far there have been a number of sessions I have attended. Here are some highlights from those sessions on how to increase performance on your drupal site.

• Look at the number of requests a page makes to the server
• Use yslow to measure page rendering (often a page performance is perceived, not just based on the server response time)
• Remove search, use alternate solutions such as Apache Solr or Google Search API
• Use CDN as much as possible
• Use Reverse Proxy Cache and memcache
• Obviously use drupal cache

Some other notes that are somewhat related to drupal performance and site performance management in a clustered hosting environment.

Manual updates and rollback

OLD WAY: tar, move/copy untar restart services OLD WAY: rsync BETTER WAY: Capistrano

Managing systems:

BETTER WAY: bcfg2

Monitoring Tools

• Capacity Load: analyzing trends, predicting load, checking results of configuration and software changes (cacti, munin)
• Failure: analyzing downtime, notification (nagios - using nrpe agents to monitor diverse services (do we use it this way?) , hyperin)

Use monitoring tools to closely observe cluster replication and cashing as the failures in this area are the most difficult to solve.