My talk from Drupalcamp London Business Day on 1st March 2013 When building big websites, you're going to face a lot of problems regardless of your technology choice. This talk unveils some of the common problems, and shows how the Drupal community will help you solve these problems.

1. SUPERSIZE ME
Making Drupal go large

2. INTRODUCTION
• Who are we?
• Building BIG Drupal
• Three pillars of scale
• Care in the community
• Q&A

3. WHO ARE WE?

6. COMMON MISCONCEPTIONS
• “Drupal is slow”
• “Drupal doesn’t scale”
• “It’s only good for a hobby site”

7. WRONG!

8. DEVELOPING BIG WEBSITES WITH
DRUPAL IS NO DIFFERENT TO
DEVELOPING THEM WITH
ANY OTHER SOFTWARE

9. DEVELOPING BIG WEBSITES WITH
DRUPAL IS NO DIFFERENT TO
DEVELOPING THEM WITH
ANY OTHER SOFTWARE

10. DRUPAL IS NO DIFFERENT TO
ANY OTHER SOFTWARE

11. SCALING PERFORMANCE
The first pillar-box of scale

12. SCALING COMPLEXITY
• Caching and Reverse proxy caches
• Queues
• Alternative database backends
• Throttling

13. MONITORING
• All the common open source tools...
• Munin, Nagios, etc
• Plus some new ones
• New Relic, Boundary
• Social media
• saved our site...

14. SCALING PEOPLE
We’re going to need a bigger boat

15. COMMUNICATION

16. PRIORITISATION

17. DISTRIBUTED WORKING

18. REDUNDANCY

19. PROJECTS CONSIST OF CODE

20. PROJECTS CONSIST OF CODE
CODE IS WRITTEN BY PEOPLE

21. PROJECTS CONSIST OF CODE
CODE IS WRITTEN BY PEOPLE
PEOPLE DELIVER PROJECTS

22. SCALING PROCESSES

23. YOU STILL NEED TO DO ALL
THE THINGS YOU WOULD DO
ON ANY BIG SOFTWARE
PROJECT

24. WHAT THINGS?
• Provide clarity of purpose • Code review
• Automated and manual • Source control
testing
• Release management
• Continuous integration
• Address technical debt
• Performance
testing and
benchmarking • Be agile (with a little ‘a’)

25. CLARITY OF PURPOSE
• Your team must know how to “do”
• The definition of “done”
• What “good” looks like

26. TESTING
• Know how you’re going to test, before you write a single line
of code
• Do it regularly
• Make it repeatable and consistent
• Automate as much as possible
• Test
Driven Development (TDD) or Behaviour Driven
Development (BDD) is even better

27. CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
• Fail fast, Fail early
• Start your project the way you mean to go on
• Providean environment where developers are allowed to
make mistakes (not just dev)
• Automate your environment setup
• Regularlybuild your environments - including deploying to
production

28. “IT DOESN’T MATTER HOW
YOUR BUILD SCRIPT WORKS,
IT ONLY MATTERS THAT IT
WORKS”

29. PERFORMANCE TESTING
• Know what you’re aiming for
• Test early, test regularly
• Benchmark common journeys and monitor changes over time
• Memory usage, Page execution time etc
• Acknowledge that Production is your only real test

30. KNOW YOUR PEAKS

31. CODE REVIEW

32. TECHNICAL DEBT

33. CARE IN THE COMMUNITY
The good news

34. YOU DON’T NEED TO REINVENT THE WHEEL

35. YOU’RE NOT THE FIRST
• Pressflow
• Published approaches to solving performance problems
• Catch’s Github page
• Drupal.org documented performance improvements
• Drupal 7 Fields optimisation (ported from Drupal 8)
• Porting performance improvements from newer versions

36. EXPERTS ARE OUT THERE
• Drupal issue queues
• Drupal High Performance Group
• IRC
• Meet-ups
• DrupalCamps and DrupalCons
• Large Scale Drupal (LSD) programme

37. DRUPAL PLAYS WELL WITH
OTHERS

38. CONTRIBUTION
• Contribution encourages good developer practice
• Testing: core changes always accompanied by a test
• Review: minimum of 2 people will review any change to
core
• Technical debt: critical issue thresholds block new features

39. SHARE AND SHARE ALIKE
• Route
• STOMP
• SQL No Revisions
• Drupal 8 Configuration Management Initiative (CMI)
• Test and Target
• Panels Filter Cache
• Various core and contrib patches

40. CONTRIBUTION CYCLE

41. WRAPPING UP

42. DRUPAL IS NO DIFFERENT TO
ANY OTHER SOFTWARE

43. THE COMMUNITY IS

44. WRAPPING UP
• Ifyou’re building big, a lot of problems exist regardless of the
technology
• Drupal provides ways to solve these problems
• The Drupal community is one of the best communities to
have a problem in
• Drupal does scale, in performance, in people, in process

45. QUESTIONS?
Tweet: @tsphethean Tweet: @alexpott
Drupal.org: tsphethean Drupal.org: alexpott
IRC: tsphethean IRC: alexpott

46. WE’RE HERE ALL WEEKEND
Come visit us on our stand
and see our other presentations
• Drupal 8 Configuration system for coders - Alex Pott (Sunday
10:30am)
• Please hold: your call is in a queue - Tom Phethean (Sunday 10:30am)
• zip-BDD-do-dah zip-BDD-ay! - Graham Taylor and Andrew
Larcombe (Sunday 11:30am)

47. IMAGE ATTRIBUTIONS
• The Elephants are coming - http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/011905_university_washington.shtml
• Pillar Box - http://www.oxfordhistory.org.uk/streets/post_boxes/edward_vii/index.html
• Jaws - http://edge.ascd.org/_Youre-Gonna-Need-a-Bigger-Boat/blog/6287739/127586.html
• Communication - http://familybugs.wordpress.com/2012/04/30/communication-part-1/
• Prioritisation - http://neilkillick.com/2011/12/17/tips-on-speedy-product-backlog-prioritisationordering/
• Remote working - http://www.wolfden.co.uk/RemoteWorking.html
• Redundancy - http://blog.800hosting.com/2011/07/workstation-backup-solutions-pt-3-redundancy/
• Scaling rock face - http://www.flickr.com/photos/alexindigo/2571638877
• Christmas - http://www.tunisia-live.net/2011/12/23/christmas-celebrations-in-tunisia-tis-the-season/
• Volcanic ash cloud - http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2010/apr/15/volcano-airport-disruption-iceland
• Technical debt - http://agileandbeyond.blogspot.co.uk/2011/05/velocity-handle-with-care.html
• Reinventing the wheel - http://www.sbi-conferences.com/dont-reinvent-the-wheel.html