We all know that Varnish is the default answer for performance, but what happens when you have to flush cache? We've set up a target Drupal eCommerce site on an amazon instance, created a load test plan and watched what happens when we made common performance improvement recommendations. We'll take a look at the results and how to analyze the numbers.

This session will answer questions such as:
What are some of the available tools to quickly stress test your site?
What are key statistics and how to interpret them during stress testing?
What can generally be done to improve Drupal site performance?

I will demonstrate results of implementing commonly used performance improvements such as varnish, memcache, APC, and others. I will discuss creating performance goals, how to create load tests and discuss the implications of different testing scenarios. We will also examine some common contributed modules and their impact on performance.