performance
The .htaccess file included with Drupal tells Apache to send all 404 requests to Drupal to handle. While this is great in some cases, the performance degradation can have a huge impact on a site that has millions of users.
When Drupal processes a 404, it has to bootstrap Drupal, which includes Apache loading up the PHP process, gathering all of the Drupal PHP files, connecting to the database, and running some queries. This is quite expensive when Apache can be told to simply say "Page not found" without having to incur any of that overhead.
MySQL Performance Tuning Primer Script
http://www.day32.com/MySQL/
http://www.day32.com/MySQL/tuning-primer.sh
This script takes information from "SHOW STATUS LIKE..." and "SHOW VARIABLES LIKE..."
to produce sane recomendations for tuning server variables.
It is compatable with all versions of MySQL 3.23 and higher (including 5.1).
Currently it handles recomendations for the following:
- Slow Query Log
- Max Connections
- Worker Threads
- Key Buffer
- Query Cache
- Sort Buffer
- Joins
- Temp Tables
- Table (Open & Definition) Cache
- Table Locking
- Table Scans (read_buffer)
- MyISAM Status
