The Definition of Crazy

Speakers: 

What is the definition of crazy?

Just about everyone knows the saying "doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result is the definition of crazy", but have you ever thought about applying that to your website? This session is an in-depth look at why your site is probably totally crazy and you don't even know it.

We'll go over the various levels in which 'crazy' exists on most sites:

Level 1: Your code. We write code every day that iterates in bad ways and iterates in ways that shouldn't repeat with every page request. Remediation techniques such as the Caching API will be discussed.

Level 2: Drupal's code. We as developers receive code from the community that is often designed to be 'crazy' by default. We'll cover examples of this and what we can do to remediate it.

Level 3: The webserver. Often the webserver is configured to do "crazy" things from recompiling your application on every page request to serving the same pages over and over again. There are technologies to fix this, we'll talk about what they are & why you use them.

Level 4: The cluster. Why would we serve the same page over and over again? Is it going to look different? why do we even need to ask drupal about this page a second time? What tools can take the crazy away from this segment? We'll discuss those.

Level 5: The world. A big site has big problems, traffic might be coming in from literally everywhere. When this happens, how do we avoid shipping the same data across the same lines every time? If only our [C]ontent could be [D]istributed across this global [N]etwork! We'll talk about why a CDN is important, the different use cases for them, and the tools and challenges associated with this.

Ultimately, attendees should come out of this understanding key caching concepts, which layers are the most helpful to look into for their particular site and where those layers can be tuned and adjusted. At a very minimum, attendees should enjoy the colorful slide deck :)

Schedule info
Track: 
Site Building
Experience level: 
Intermediate
Drupal Version: 
Drupal 7.x