It’s been a whole year since the Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit in Vancouver. This year it was held in Portland, Oregon at the Portland State University. It was great to see everyone, specifically the crew from ImageXMedia, OpenSourcery, and all my fellow freelancers.
Of the handful of sessions I caught, I really enjoyed the two on performance. The first was by Mike Carper on front end performance. It was a great review of the tools available for measuring performance metrics and modules for enhancing a Drupal theme. I didn’t realize a web browser will only make 6 concurrent connections for images to a single domain. The solution is to create multiple subdomains to serve images just as Facebook and Flickr do. He also did a great job explaining ways of integrating a content delivery network into a Drupal site.
The second session was by Josh Koenig from Pantheon (these guys know their performance and scalability). In this session, Josh discussed improvements that can be made to the server to increase backend performance. The gist is to increase a servers ability to cache content at every possible layer. He even referenced the Boost module which is a creation of Mike Carper. I would definitely recommend his slides and feel free to contact me if anyone needs a run down or some tips. He closed by saying that getting a server cache isn’t hard, the hard part is getting it to let go of the cache for fresh content.
I’m very excited for the new Drupal Business Summits that are being put together. I got word of one in Vancouver in May – I’ll keep you posted.