How to scale drupal from shared hosting to clustered environment

Updated to clarify that this is an overview session with Q & A at the end or after.

SESSION OVERVIEW
“Scaling Drupal, performance and scalability (server/database optimization and distribution)”

A prime question in the minds of people thinking of converting to drupal, or people who have launched a site in drupal and are experience their first tastes of heavy traffic. How do I scale Drupal properly? This session will outline a timeline from your $5/mo shared hosting straight through to sitting on a $5000/mo cluster. Each step will be separated into the components of Drupal (Apache, PHP, MySQL, file serving).

It would be impossible to go into too much deatil at each of these levels, rather this is meant as an overview of what path to take to get from A->B->C->D

Beyond server configuration, this session will cover some monitoring services you should look into, load testing, non-platform scaling stategies (eaccelerator, memcache, fastpath static file caching, etc.). This session will be a lecture format, with QA during the session and at the end.

If I don’t get all the way through this, and there is interest we can carry the conversation to a BoF.

TRACK
Site Building

AGENDA
* Overview of Drupal Components: PHP, Apache, MySQL, file serving.
* 1 - Single server configuration and optimization.
* 2 - Separate Database Box
* 3 - Adding Webheads (PHP optimization, dealing with a Load Balancer, keeping in synch.)
* 4 - NFS, and CDN’s. - Outsourcing the files directory.
* 5 - Redundancy (MySQL Replication), backup scripts, etc.
* 6 - MySQL Optimization - my.cnf, query optimization, and identifying bottlenecks)
* 7 - Alternate Optimization - eaccelerator, memcache, static file caching,
* 8 - Monitoring - or “How do I know what part broke?”
* 9 - Future - splitting read and write queries, more stuff I need to think of?

THIS IS TOO MUCH FOR A SINGLE SESSION. I’ll go on as long as you let me.

GOALS
Newbies will walk away with a solid idea of what to ask a managed hosting provider. Experienced devs will get an idea of how to continue scaling

RESOURCES