high-speed

Drupal Performance White Paper - Drupal and the LAMP stack

LAMP Stack with Drupal - Druplicon, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP

Drupal is a scalable, flexible, and open source content management system that is built to run on a variety of server architectures. The only real requirement is that PHP runs on your system. You can run Linux, Microsoft, Mac OS X, etc., along with Apache, IIS, nginx, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. if you're willing to do a few extra things.

However, the overwhelming majority of Drupal websites use the most popular LAMP stack on the backend: Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. This white paper (which is a living document – I'll be updating it as time progresses) provides my thoughts on performance considerations for Drupal on a LAMP stack, but this information can be used for pretty much any system on any server, if you look at the basic principles.

Sections:

Front End Performance
Drupal Performance
Apache Performance
PHP Performance
MySQL Performance
Linux/Server Tuning
Disaster/Data Recovery
Other Tuning/Expanding Horizontally

First - Front End Performance

HTML, CSS, Images and JavaScript

These three technologies rule the web. Almost everything worth doing on the web involves these three languages at some point. There are a ton of things you can do to speed up your website by simply looking at the code generated by your website that reaches the end-user—in fact, you should do this before even thinking about looking at the LAMP stack.

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Mythbusters uses Nikon Lens on High-Speed Camera

December 06, 2009

One of my favorite features of any Mythbusters shows is the high-speed sequences, where they film an explosion, a reaction, etc. on a high-speed camera, then slow it down to half or a quarter of real life speed (example).

Watching season four on Netflix recently, I saw a rare closeup of the high-speed, and to my surprise, found mounted a 50mm f/1.4D Nikon lens (the same one I use on my D90 70% of the time!). It's an excellent lens, and I can understand why they use it; it's basically a 'light vacuum cleaner," meaning it sucks up light like few other lenses. You can only get a little wider (Nikon makes an f/1.2 (and used to make an f/0.95, and Canon used to make an f/1.0!).

When shooting high-speed, you need as much light to enter the lens as possible - you're taking sometimes 120 or more frames every second, and you have to divide the photos per second into those frames. Less photons reaching the sensor = lower picture quality. So it's understandable why they have such a nice lens on the high speed.

Mythbusters High-Speed Camera - Nikon f/1.4 50mm Lens