Drupal Performance: The Impact of Flash

Note: This session used to be called Drupal Performance and Database Tuning. I will be focusing on hardware instead, in particular why you want PCI-based flash storage.

Presentation slides are available at http://www.slideshare.net/ChristophWeber/optimize-your-hardware-for-drupal

Hardware matters

Well, duh, we all know that. However, most of our Drupal performance discussions center on the software stack - Drupal itself and the LAMP stack, and how we can tweak software to make our sites run at peak performance. In this session I will shine the light on recent hardware trends and how and why you might want to opt for owning a cutting edge server rather than trust the "cloud" or a VPS to perform adequately for you.

Low latency flash storage is a game changer

MySQL is generally regarded as the Drupal bottleneck, and we do everything in our power to avoid hitting the database. I will show how database performance increases when we use PCI flash storage instead of rotating spindles, and how it dramatically changes the playing field. With flash storage in place you can now completely rethink your performance strategy and server architecture.