a while ago i posted some performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud.

amazon have just released ebs, the final piece of technology that makes their ec2 platform really viable for running lamp stacks stuck as drupal.

ebs, the "elastic block store", provides sophisticated storage for your database instance, with features including:

• high io throughput
• data replication
• large storage capacity
• hot backups using snapshots
• instance type portability e.g. quickly swapping your database hardware for a bigger machine.

recently i posted a couple of introductory articles on jmeter, a great apache open-source tool that allows you to measure the performance and scalability of a wide variety of services, especially web-applications.

i wrote these articles because although the online documentation provides reasonable reference material, it doesn't serve well as a jmeter introduction or tutorial.

things have changed a bit since then. the uk-based publishing house packt publishing were kind enough to send me a copy of emily halili's newly published book on jmeter, which is as far as i can tell, is the first book dedicated to the subject.

recently i posted some encouraging performance benchmarks for drupal running on a variety of servers in amazon's elastic compute cloud. while the performance was encouraging, the suitability of this environment for running lamp stacks was not. ec2 had some fundamental issues including a lack of static ip addresses and no viable persistent storage mechanism.

amazon are quickly rectifying these problems, and recently announced elasic ip addresses; a "static" ip address that you own and can dynamically point at any of your instances.

today amazon indicated that persistent storage will soon be available.

amazon's elastic compute cloud, "ec2", provides a flexible and scalable hosting option for applications. while ec2 is not inherently suited for running application stacks with relational databases such as lamp, it does provide many advantages over traditional hosting solutions.

in this article we get a sense of lamp performance on ec2 by running a series of benchmarks on the drupal cms system. these benchmarks establish read throughput numbers for logged-in and logged-out users, for each of amazon's hardware classes.

we also look at op-code caching, and gauge it's performance benefit in cpu-bound lamp deployments.

i recently posted an introductory article on using jmeter to load test your drupal application. if you've read this article and are curious about how to build a more sophisticated test that mimics realistic load on your site, read on.

the previous article showed you how to set up jmeter and create a basic test. to produce a more realistic test you should simulate "real world" use of your site. this typically involves simulating logged-in and logged-out users browsing and creating content. jmeter has some great functionality to help you do this.

there are many things that you can do to improve your drupal application's scalability, some of which we discussed in the recent scaling drupal - an open-source infrastructure for high-traffic drupal sites article.

when making scalability modifications to your system, it's important to quantify their effect, since some changes may have no effect or even decrease your scalability. the value of advertised scalability techniques often depends greatly on your particular application and network infrastructure, sometimes creating additional complexity with little benefit.

apache jmeter is a great tool to simulate load on your system and measure performance under that load. in this article, i demonstrate how to setup a testing environment, create a simple test and evaluate the results.