Drupal
The team over at Promet Source is sharing their expertise in a webinar showing you how to properly stress test your Drupal site. Andy Kucharski has asked me to join him in sharing best practices with anyone needing to understand the load testing process.
Andy is a frequent speaker at Drupal camps and conferences all over the country. He is recognized as one of the top minds in the world when it comes to architecting an effective Drupal implementation. Andy’s reputation recently has skyrocketed as the foremost performance specialist on Drupal technology.
Real Drupal Performance Data from Promet Load Tests
One of the coolest parts of the webinar will be Andy’s data that compares the performance of Drupal hosted on Amazon versus Rackspace. His team has done some real load testing with Drupal identical applications installed on different environments. There are statistics for AWS EC2 Small and Medium instances, and there are stats for Rackspace Cloud 2G and 4G instances.
Promet Source, web application development specialists in Chicago, announced their official partnership with LoadStorm recently. Their press release called it, “Drupal systems finally able to undergo efficient, rigorous load-barring testing.”
According to Promet’s team, they like the “powerful, cost-effective web load test tool, and
with LoadStorm’s ability to quickly create a load test to simulate a scenario of sudden high traffic to a given website, the partnership represents the continuing evolution of Promet Source’s test driven development.”
“The complex online systems that we build require rigorous testing,” says Andrew Kucharski, President of Promet Source. “With LoadStorm, we have been able to offer our clients the assurance that their website can withstand the high level of traffic that they can expect their site will draw.”
Promet Source’s clients will now benefit from capacity planning that is backed by custom-built automated scaling systems that will be able to respond to traffic surges. Promet, in partnership with LoadStorm, has already been able to ensure that their client OptionIt, a popular online reservation tool, is able to withstand the high peaks in traffic it receives after crucial sporting championships or tour announcements.
Most farmers don’t like the idea of their cornfields being hit hard by a storm. However, this is bit different.
The DrupalCorn Camp 2012 will be held on the Iowa State University campus in Ames on August 3-4, 2012 for open source enthusiasts, Drupal designers, hackers, Drupal developers, UI experts, IT managers, and web performance geeks like us.
We here at LoadStorm are Drupal fans because this site is built on it. We have worked with Drupal for many sites, and it is a great open source app for publishing content.
The highlight of this world-class event is Thunder and Lightning: LoadStorm and Other Ways to Stress Out Your Drupal Site by Andy Kucharski, who is considered to be on the best Drupal developers in the world. His company of Drupal experts are highly recommended in the open source community. Our customers have worked with them to improve the performance of project built upon Drupal’s code. There are so many configuration settings and Drupal app intricacies that affect performance that it usually pays big dividends to Andy and his team involved.
Apparently, he likes LoadStorm as a load testing tool. We are honored to be associated with such a skilled open source geek, and we wish to support Andy in his presentation. Please register for the event if you can be in Ames Friday and Saturday.
A Little Cache Goes a Long Way
Drupal is the target of load testing for this series of articles. If this is your first time reading any of the articles in this series, please review the introduction and summary called Load Testing Drupal for a good context of what we are doing.
Drupal is one of the most popular open source content management platforms and is being adopted at ever larger organizations because of its powerful features.
Our team is conducting load testing against copies of Drupal on various sizes of EC2 instances. We intend to establish performance benchmarks for Drupal version 6.x.
I was in a meeting this morning with our development team, and we have a desire to run some load tests against Drupal. We want to find out how Drupal performs on a standard Amazon EC2 small instance. We believe LoadStorm can do a good job of stressing an out-of-the-box Drupal application implementation. Not sure if we want to use a LAMP or MS stack yet, and we are open for suggestions.
Anybody interested in this type of tech study?
We are planning a load test of a basic LAMP Drupal target system using LoadStorm. This provides a description of the necessary environment on the system, a walk-through of testing steps, and expected results from the load test. LoadStorm does not require the user to setup large amounts of servers for an isolated test.