I’ve had the pleasure of working with Andy Kucharski for several years on various performance testing projects. He’s recognized as one of the top Drupal performance experts in the world. He is the Founder of Promet Source and is a frequent speaker at conferences, as well as a great client of LoadStorm. As an example of his speaking prowess, he gave the following presentation at Drupal Mid Camp in Chicago 2014.
Promet Source is a Drupal web application and website development company that offers expert services and support. They specialize in building and performance tuning complex Drupal web applications. Andy’s team worked with our Web Performance Lab to conduct stress testing on Drupal Commerce in a controlled environment. He is skilled at using LoadStorm and New Relic to push Drupal implementations to the point of failure. His team tells me he is good at breaking things.
In this presentation at Drupal Mid Camp, Andy explained how his team ran several experiments in which they load tested a kickstarter drupal commerce site on an AWS instance and then compared how the site performed after several well known performance tuning enhancements were applied. They compared performance improvements after Drupal cache, aggregation, Varnish, and Nginx reverse proxy.
View the below slideshare to see the summary of the importance of web performance and to see how they used LoadStorm to prove that they were able to scale Drupal Commerce from a point of failure (POF) of 100 users to 450 users! That’s a tremendous 450% improvement in scalability.