Presented at Sept '10 Atlanta Drupal User's Group Meeting

From a base install of Ubuntu Server 10.04 (download here), we'll spend 5 minutes ramping up LAMP to be a powerful tool in order to show how easy it is to create a high-performance web site. The demonstration was geared towards non-sysadmins, possibly afraid of diving into the command-line and setting up some performance tools. Instead, I want to show how easy it can be to get your own Pantheon (formerly Project Mercury)-type setup done in no time!

NOTE: Ubuntu Server has no GUI. If you'd like something more comfortable, these instructions will work just the same on Ubuntu Desktop. Obviously, you would not want a GUI running on your real web server, taking up valuable resources.

For these demonstration, the follow assumptions are being made -
- You are logged in as the main Ubuntu user (the one with sudo access).
- You have drush installed and configured in your PATH.

Setup

Now, let's get started with the basics -

1. Install Ubuntu Server preselecting the "LAMP server" and "OpenSSH server" packages.
2. Pull your Drupal project onto the server at /var/www or download a copy of Pressflow and start from scratch. Run install.php and get the database setup. Varnish requires the use of Pressflow, so an existing site must be migrated for Varnish to work properly. Memcache and APC will work with vanilla Drupal as well.
3. Jump into a root shell -

1. We'll also need a command line-ready version of PHP (something Ubuntu packages separate) -

1. Turn on external page caching in Drupal -

APC

Our first optimization tip will be setting up PHP for success. This means using APC. Without getting into specifics, APC speeds up the processing of PHP by storing information used by PHP between processes. This shared memory prevents PHP from having to re-do a lot of repetitive work.

1. Install APC (Alternative PHP Cache) using -

1. By default, APC comes with a 64MB shared cache. For our example, we won't need to increase this.
2. First, let's get PHP amped up. To get PHP to see the new APC extension, we'll need to restart the Apache process -

1. Let's double-check that PHP can now see the APC extension -

You should see a single line output with "apc".

Memcached

Now, let's get Memcached up and running. Memcache allows Drupal to move many of its cache operations into fast memory and take the strain off of MySQL.

1. Install Memcached, libmemcached (C/C++ library), memcached PECL extension (PHP wrapper) using -

1. By default, memcached runs on port 11211 with 64MB of memory. Again, we won't worry about specific configurations to keep things simple.
2. Download the Memcache Drupal module -

1. For the purpose of ensuring Memcache is working, enable the memcache_admin module -

1. You should now see Memcache statistics at the bottom of each page. Disable this module after initial testing -

Varnish

Also, we are going to install Varnish and get a simple setup running. For this, you will need Pressflow as your base Drupal install.

1. Install Varnish using -

1. Copy the configuration from the Four Kitchens wiki to replace the base

file.
3. Convert Apache to listen on port 8080 instead of the default port 80 -

1. Change Varnish's default port to port 80 -

1. Change Varnish's default storage from file to malloc (a.k.a. memory) with a storage size of 64M -

1. Now restart both services (in this order!) -

1. Enjoy Varnish goodness!

Conclusions

Following some strong jMeter testing, the unoptimized virtual machine (with 1GB RAM) would crash within about 20-30 secs when the load had exceeded 70. The optimized machine on the other hand, finished the test, taking about 2 minutes, with >2k reqs/sec and a load ~4.