Drupal can be a resource-intensive system; any moderately complicated site will generate a lot of database queries and use a fair amount of memory to build pages to serve to visitors. With some judicious tuning, however, Drupal can perform really well, and at scale.

The support team at Acquia look after thousands of Drupal sites from the very small and simple to the very large and complex. All too often we see sites that are initially not configured to perform optimally, and struggle when traffic levels rise.

In this talk we'll set out the most common problems we encounter, and go through some straightforward ways of identifying and remedying these perilous performance pitfalls, often without writing a single line of code.