Jeremy Andrews

SearchBench has received a couple of useful updates since yesterday's initial cloud tests. It can generate search queries based on actual content, and it can export search benchmark results. In gaining these features, it is now possible to use SearchBench to perform some actual performance comparisons. Once again I set up these tests on an extra large EC2 instance. I still have not performed any tuning, and I continue to test Drupal 5 core search...

Jeremy Andrews

I ran some initial Drupal search benchmarks with SearchBench on Amazon's EC2 cloud service. These first tests were primarily focused on confirming that SearchBench and EC2 are a good match. They utilized a single server instance, and did not include any server tuning. I used the devel module to create 5,000 random nodes and 10,000 random comments. I indexed this content both with Drupal's core search module, and with the contributed Xapian module. I then...

Jeremy Andrews

There have been some ongoing scalability issues affecting Drupal.org's built in search functionality for some time now. Less interested in outsourcing search to a big black box such as Google, I spent some time helping clean up the Xapian module , making it possible to completely replace Drupal's built in SQL-powered search functionality with a Xapian powered engine. With the basic search functionality complete, there was still a need to actually compare the performance of...

Eric Searcy

This week the Tag1 website got a new face. Notable is the new logo in the upper-left, as well the matching theme. Feel free to post your feedback as comments to this post. This was my first go at Drupal theming (I started from an existing theme---not from scratch!) and it was fairly intuitive. However, I ran into a some issues that my web design colleagues constantly gripe about, as well as ones I wasn't...

Eric Searcy

Continuing my plans to set up an IPVS high-availability LAMP stack on EC2, I needed to add the kernel modules for IPVS. I have been using the CentOS machine images provided by RightScale, which have unneeded services disabled and, although they are set up to work with RightScale's software, work very well for general use. Unfortunately, the IPVS kernel modules are not among those pre-installed on the AMI. I might have expected a simple kernel...

Jeremy Andrews

The Ad Bard Network was conceived because I have a need for relevant, non-obnoxious advertisements on my website, KernelTrap.org . I have maintained KernelTrap for many years, as a hobby in my spare time, and as a way to stay involved in the open source world. I enjoy this hobby, but it requires a lot of time and commitment keeping the website updated every day. I've long dreamed of finding a way to make a...

Eric Searcy

This last week I've had the fortune to have some spare time to play around with Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). I'm pretty interested in the potential for scaling the LAMP stack by having a programmable cluster at the service of your box. A lot of the documentation I find seems to be by people either scaling via dynamic DNS additions when they add more nodes, or by using EC2 nodes as application servers used...

Jeremy Andrews

With all the excitement surrounding cloud computing, and specifically Amazon's EC2 (Elastic Compute Cloud) Beta service, I decided it was time to give it a try myself. Without much personal background in the new service, I found that there are an overwhelming number of pages talking about EC2, and even Drupal on EC2 , but didn't locate a simple guide to quickly get me up and running. Having now spent a few hours today learning...

Jeremy Andrews

We are honored to have received praise from Drupal founder Dries Buytaert, who said in his blog (emphasis added): It is not always easy to scale Drupal -- not because Drupal sucks, but simply because scaling the LAMP stack (including Drupal) takes no small amount of skill. [...] Either you can do all of the above yourself, or you outsource it to a company that knows how to do this for you. Both are non-trivial...

Jeremy Andrews

I'm pleased to announce that Tag1 Consulting has partnered up with MySQL AB to offer an online presentation titled "Achieving Optimal MySQL Performance For Drupal". Aiming to provide a better understanding of how to properly monitor and tune your MySQL database, the online Webinar will take place on Thursday, January 31st, 2008, at 16:00 UTC (11:00 am EST). The presentation will last 45 minutes, followed by 15 minutes for questions and answers. You can sign...