mysql

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:

1. Front End Performance
2. Drupal Performance
3. Apache Performance
4. PHP Performance
5. MySQL Performance
6. Linux/Server Tuning
7. Disaster/Data Recovery
8. 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.