Sessions

Making Drupal Go Fast with Varnish and Pressflow

*

Session Audio

Download audio of this session

Accepted Session
Cooking
Long Form
osb2010-0309
Scheduled: Wednesday, June 2, 2010 from 10:00 – 11:45am in Fremont
Session notes

Excerpt

You've launched your new web site and it's starting to get some attention. You've tuned your database and optimized your HTTP daemon, but what if it's not enough to keep up with all the hits you're getting? We'd like to introduce you to your two new best friends: Varnish and Pressflow.

Description

Are you ready if your web site gets popular or goes viral? A site that was happily handling a few thousand page views a day can very suddenly find itself struggling to handle hundreds of thousands of hits. The combination of Pressflow’s enhancements to Drupal and Varnish’s lightning-fast cache provide a free and open source way to exponentially increase the amount of traffic a Drupal-based web site can serve, allowing you to meet the demand without additional expensive hardware. During the session, we will cover the following topics:

  • What Pressflow is and how it is different from the Drupal content management system
  • What Varnish is and what it can do to help
  • Why Pressflow+Varnish may be a good option for your web site
  • Tips and tools for tuning and optimizing your configuration to make the most out of your precious server resources
  • Lessons learned – what not to do
  • Real-world examples from live sites running Pressflow and Varnish

The open source Drupal content management system powers numerous prominent web sites including:

  • President Obama’s White House web site
  • Linux Journal
  • Zappos

Pressflow and Varnish are being used by some of the largest Drupal sites in the world:

  • The Economist Online
  • NBC Universal Bravo TV
  • The Grammy Awards

Tags

Drupal, scaling, cache

Speaking experience

Back to list of sessions

Speakers

  • 50516-96-20090421074744

    Rudy Grigar

    OSUOSL / Tag1 Consulting

    Biography

    I am a Computer Science student from Oregon State University with additional focus in New Media (web design/social networking) and Business (IT management).

    I have worked at the Open Source Lab in Corvallis for the last 3 years, where I have been given the opportunity to work directly with large and small open source projects. I have recently focused on scaling webapps through various levels of caching, database optimizations and application tweaks.

    I am also a Performance Engineer for Tag1 Consulting, Inc., where I am able to focus more on scalability of the LAMP stack — specifically Drupal.

    Sessions

  • Gchaix_320

    Greg Lund-Chaix

    OSU Open Source Lab

    Biography

    Greg has spent the last 15 years working on various telecommunications and distance education projects within the State of Oregon. Greg’s current project is building online teaching and learning tools for the Oregon Department of Education’s Oregon Virtual School District project.

    Sessions