Articles

These are the slides from the presentation on building Drupal sites using CCK, Views and Panels, given at Drupal Camp Toronto 2007, held at the University of Toronto Bahen Centre on 11 and 12 May 2007.

Slides in PDF and Open Office formats are attached.

This is a presentation on Performance tuning and optimization of high traffic Drupal sites.

It was given at the Drupal Camp Toronto 2007, held at the University of Toronto Bahen Centre on 11 and 12 May 2007.

Available in PDF and OpenOffice formats below.

As promised earlier in my presentation on building Drupal sites using CCK, Views and Panels, here is an article on how to write a custom panel, that implements a custom layout.

I called it mypanel, and it implements a new layout that is best represented by the icon on the right.

Now that the new watchdog hook is in Drupal core, and slated for release with Drupal 6, we can do some neat tricks in syslog to route Drupal event messages.

This article details some examples on how syslog can be used with Drupal.

Under UNIX like systems, the configuration for syslog should be in /etc/syslog.conf. By editing this file and adding the appropriate entries, we can control how Drupal messages are routed.

In a previous article, I stressed a common problem with all PHP op-code caches/accelerators: they die with segmentation faults every once in a while.

To get around this problem, here is a script that would restart Apache when a segmentation fault is detected.

This script was written by Firebright Inc., with a few modifications, such as sending an email notice.

Here is the logwatcher.php script:

Here is the presentation that was given Tuesday March 13, 2007 to the Drupal User Group in Toronto.

As per the title, it discusses the tool set consisting of CCK, Views and Panels, and how they allow custom web site development with little or no coding required.

Be sure to check the Links and Resources section at the end for more reading.

As a site grows, the overhead of executing so many queries per page against the database starts to add up.

This is where caching can benefit a high traffic site.

Drupal core caching

Caching stores "elements" in a cache table in the database, so the data can be retrieved by a single query, rather that constructing the page from individual elements.

Drupal's core cache has two parts, stuff that gets caches no matter what, and stuff that is optional via an administrator defined settings.

Update: We later conducted tests that include XCache and published them in our article on benchmarking Drupal with PHP op-code caches: APC, eAccelerator and XCache compared.

In an earlier article on PHP op-code caches and accelerators, we stated that empirical observations show that APC feels faster compared to eAccelerator.