Load Testing Blog
Optimizing Drupal: From Baseline Drupal to the Pantheon Drupal Platform
Note: This is Part 2 of an ongoing series on Drupal performance and load testing. If you haven’t already, read the introduction.
Summary
We measured Drupal’s performance with a naive and recommended configuration, and again using the Pantheon Drupal Platform, demonstrating a better than 15x improvement in performance.
Procedure
We created a Drupal installation on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, which allows us to start and customize Drupal in a matter of minutes. For these tests we used Amazon’s “Large” 64bit instance, which corresponds roughly to a dual-core machine with 7.5 GB of memory.
Our baseline platform consisted of a stock Fedora Core 8 with … Continue reading »
Load Testing Drupal: Introduction
At Web Performance, we’re all about measuring and optimizing web applications. This quarter we decided to test a variety of Drupal configurations, starting with the most basic (unpack the drupal tarball into /var/www and run) and collecting benchmarks with increasingly sophisticated systems using optimized LAMP stacks and even a dual-server caching configuration.
For our test scenario, we imagined that we had just started a small drupal-based blog when a popular website linked to one of our stories and directed massive traffic onto our server. These visitors read stories, followed interesting links, and posted comments of their own. We … Continue reading »
How to Develop a Robust Load Testing Plan
When I first started writing test cases with Load Tester, I found it easy to fall into the psychological trap of writing functional test cases. But load testing requires a different approach, and inadequate tests can cost you time and money.
Functional test cases (such as the unit tests popularized by JUnit) confirm the correctness of a system. These tests should be highly specific and have excellent code coverage. A good engineer approaches functional testing as though she were designing a jet engine: if any screw, flange, or circuit fails then the entire system is completely … Continue reading »