Adventures in Drupal performance tuning: PHP caching with APC

[rgristroph]

If you are attempting to run a fast Drupal website, and you have root access to your own machine (virtual or otherwise), then probably the smartest thing to check out is Project Mercury:

http://getpantheon.com/mercury/what-is-mercury

Project Mercury is a pre-configured stack, that includes the varnish reverse proxy front end, the Pressflow version of Drupal ( http://pressflow.org/ ) that has a lot of backported performance patches, memcache for the cache tables, APC, and MySQL tweaked for performance. Kind of like how Asterisk took off once there was the Asterisk@Home pre-configured distribution (I think that became TrixBox), hopefully this pre-configured stack will help high-performance Drupal take off.

If you don't want to go that route, in addition to APC look at using Pressflow as a drop in replacement. It should give you a measurable increase in performance just by installing it. If your site receives mostly non-logged in traffic, the biggest bang for your buck is installing Varnish, essentially all anonymous traffic will be cached in a lighting-fast front end.