David Strauss is the co-founder of Pantheon Systems and Four Kitchens as well as the Pressflow Drupal distribution. Pressflow has been used on a lot of enterprise-level, Drupal 6 sites primarily to implement reverse-proxy cache systems like Varnish. Some of these performance & scalability improvements require changes to Drupal core, and so Pressflow exists to backport the improvements from Drupal 7 to Drupal 6, but also to upstream proven solutions from Pressflow back into Drupal 7. Now that Drupal 7 has been released, Strauss talks about some of the latest approaches in improving performance and reducing latency such as Edge Side Includes and parallel rendering of individual pieces of content. He also talks about the incompatibility with HipHop for PHP with Drupal 7’s PDO layer, and some possible solutions to make it compatible. Strauss also gives his opinions on the costs and benefits of node.js, and why he sees event computing as being “the future of web applications.” Finally, Struass discusses what he’s been working on lately with the Pantheon service for developers and trying to make it easier to implement the best practices for Drupal deployment.
For more information on Pressflow and how to and tune a high-performance LAMP stack and configure Varnish and Memecache, then be sure to check out our 5-hour video series on Drupal Performance & Scalability over at Drupalize.me.