We hope that this book has given you an actionable approach to improving the performance of your Drupal website. Website performance is a very broad topic, and while we hope we have given enough information about common performance issues, it’s just not possible to cover everything in detail. Here, we present a number of resources for additional reading on many of the topics we’ve covered in the book, as well as general resources for Drupal performance and scalability.
This book has an official website that links to code snippets and configuration files discussed in the book.
There is a Drupal Group focused on high-performance Drupal issues. This is a good place to see what other people are doing and to ask performance- and scalability-related questions.
Drupal Watchdog is the only print magazine specific to Drupal. The magazine includes articles from many well-known Drupal contributors focusing on many different topics, including Drupal performance. Articles are made freely available online sometime after each issue is released in print.
The Pro Git book is available here. The Git Flow extensions that are built around the branching model mentioned in Chapter 9 are available at here. A general comparison of Git and Subversion can be found here.
The Varnish Reference Manual is the authoritative source for configuring Varnish and writing VCL. There are a number of Varnish Modules and Extensions (VMODs) located at https://www.varnish-cache.org/vmods that can help you easily extend the functionality of your VCL files.
One advantage of using modularized configuration management systems is that it is easy to share and reuse code. The Chef community is perhaps one of the best at this, with its vast collection of cookbooks. Puppet also has a growing list of community modules.
There are a number of prebuilt Vagrant virtual machine “boxes” available online. Vagrantbox.es provides links to many of them, including “official” boxes provided by PuppetLabs, Opscode (Chef), and Ubuntu.
Jenkins has a number of plug-ins that make it even more useful. Some of the ones we use most frequently include:
- The GitHub plug-in, which lets you tie into GitHub repos and kick off jobs based on activity there
- The Build Keeper plug-in, which allows you to configure rules to keep or discard builds
- The Performance plug-in, which ties into JMeter or JUnit test runs in order to display test data and can trigger a build error condition based on errors during the test run
The MySQL Performance Blog is an excellent source for tips, tools, and some very interesting benchmarks and test cases.
To extend on the index structure overview that was given in Chapter 15, check out Jeremy Cole’s blog post “B+Tree index structures in InnoDB”.
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