This is a starting point for optimizing your Drupal configuration on Joyent Accelerators. There is certainly room for improvement and automation. So, if you feel so inclined to contribute, please do so.

Out of the box, drupal does pretty good on Joyent. With some tuning, Joyent has multiple production Drupal sites with recorded traffic volumes from very small to well over 1.5 Billion Page Views per month. A recent load test did 1000 requests/sec (2.5 Billion Page views per month) to a dynamic node in a well configured Drupal installation.

   SSH in to webserver as both shell user and 'admin' (webmin user), change webpassword with command: passwd

   Change mysql root password with http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/mysql-change-root-password/

   CREATE DATABASE `drupal` DEFAULT CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_general_ci;
   CREATE USER 'drupal'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY 'pass1';
   GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, INDEX, ALTER ON databasename.* TO 'username'@'localhost';
   FLUSH privileges;
   (note: for drupal 6 (see install.mysql.txt in root for drupal 5 (different permissions needed))

(do this before installing drupal to make sure it can be installed correctly (with mysqli for example [unless using postgres])

   sudo nano /opt/local/etc/php.ini
   edit /opt/local/etc/php.ini on webservers
   turn on: extension=mysqli.so
   turn off: ;extension=mysql.so
   turn on: extension=apc.so

For a large Drupal site, one of the biggest performance boosts one can do is to install an op-code cache/accelerator, such as APC. See this article:

http://2bits.com/articles/php-op-code-caches-accelerators-a-must-for-a-large-site.html

Here is a sample config we used that a good start for most sites.

You will add this to the bottom of your /opt/local/etc/php.ini file:

   [APC]
   ;specifies the size for each shared memory segment
   apc.shm_size=32
   ;max amount of memory a script can occupy
   apc.max_file_size=1M
   apc.ttl=0
   apc.gc_ttl=3600
   ; means we are always atomically editing the files
   apc.file_update_protection=0
   apc.enabled=1
   apc.enable_cli=0
   apc.cache_by_default=1
   apc.include_once_override=0
   apc.localcache=0
   apc.localcache.size=512
   apc.num_files_hint=1000
   apc.report_autofilter=0
   apc.rfc1867=0
   apc.slam_defense=0
   apc.stat=1
   apc.stat_ctime=0
   acp.ttl=7200
   apc.user_entries_hint=4096
   apc.user_ttl=7200
   apc.write_lock=1

   Download  http://pecl.php.net/package/APC and put apc.php  in your directory so you can go to yoursite.com/apc.php

   Restart webserver with command: sudo svcadm restart http

Assess your system's activity and resource consumption using the prstat command. Disable Unnecessary Processes/Services:

   
   svcs to identify running processes

If you do not need to run a mail server on your Accelerator (if you have multiple Accelerators, do this on each separate Accelerator)

   sudo svcadm disable postfix
   sudo svcadm disable courier
   sudo svcadm disable courier:authlib
   sudo svcadm disable courier:imap

if you have multiple accelerators, you can disable Apache on the database server by running:

   sudo svcadm disable httpd

Disable APACHE/PHP and MySQL if not needed on each server where it's not needed to free up resources.

Configure my.cnf

This file lives at /opt/local/etc/my.cnf

   log-slow-queries = /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log
   long_query_time=1
   log-queries-not-using-indexes

   touch  /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log (make sure to create mysql directory)
   chown mysql:mysql  /var/log/mysql/mysql-slow.log

<this section in testing>After the system is running for 1-2 days, you’ll want to tweak the settings in the my.conf file. See these resources:

It's highly recommended that you learn to read and use the to called MySQLReport from HackmySQL.com

   http://hackmysql.com/mysqlreport

This is very valuable tool for tuning over time as your site changes. There are others of course as well. Add links…

   cd to apache /opt/local/etc/httpd/

IF NOT USING A CDN or Separating your Static content to an Nginx cluster, then turning KeepAlive On — at very large #s, it is better to have this off and use a CDN and/or split off static content to a media cluster, but with smaller sites this leads to many connections to download each image/file for each page view

   edit includes/keepalive.conf and turn on, KeepAliveTimeout = 2

disable apache modules don't need includes/dso.conf

   dav_svn_module
   authz_sv_module

add in ErrorLog /home/[sitename]/logs/error_log

copy drupal's .htaccess file into the

httpd/conf/virtualhosts/sitename.conf so apcahe doesn't have to look for this file on each request and add AllowOverride None and stick drupal's rules in between <directory></directory>

   <Directory /home/YOURSITE/web/public/files>
   SetHandler Drupal_Security_Do_Not_Remove_See_SA_2006_006
   Options +FollowSymlinks
   </Directory>

If you have multiple webservers, setting the /files directory to be an NFS mount and sym link it to something like:

    ln -s /shared/sitename/files files

By default, apache is bound to * for ease of set up

<VirtualHost *:80> very small speed hit when you leave the * instead of the actual IP, but it is a tradeoff many of our customers choose to take.

Edit htaccess to either redirect from www.domain.com to domain.com or domain.com to www.domain.com (to force one or other, no duplicate content, SEO)

http://wiki.joyent.com/_media/all-accelerators:kb:joyent_elastic_systems_architecture_-_drupal_6.2.jpg

restart http with svcadm restart http

* http://www.lullabot.com/articles/using-lighttpd-static-file-server

* http://www.slideshare.net/AndyForbes/scaling-drupal-the-worth-point-web-site-442294

* http://www.johnandcailin.com/blog/john/scaling-drupal-step-four-database-segmentation-using-mysql-proxy

* http://www.scribd.com/doc/2815166/BIGIP-Reference-Guide-v4-5

* http://blog.kovyrin.net/2006/05/18/nginx-as-reverse-proxy/

* http://www.scribd.com/doc/3768693/Scaling-Drupal-Hosting

* http://wiki.joyent.com/accelerators:nginx_apache_proxy#building-installing-nginx

* http://drupal.org/project/memcache

* http://drupal.org/files/infratalk_barca.pdf

* http://drupal.org/node/259374/release

* http://buytaert.net/scaling-with-mysql-replication

* http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Database_access

* http://drupal.org/project/cacherouter

* http://www.sauers.com/blog/setting-up-drupal/

* http://www.slantview.com/blog/slantview/drupal-caching-cache-router

* http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions/caching-and-performance-improvements

* http://drupal.org/user/73183

* http://20bits.com/2007/02/27/4-problems-with-drupal/