We love Drush, Drupal's all-purpose command-line tool, for people who can't stand checkboxes. It's fast, efficient, plays nicely with Version Control Systems like CVS, SVN and Git, and even cleans the kitchen sink. However, after moving our DrupalEasy.com site to a new server we encountered a minor snag. When trying to run even the simplest of Drush commands, we were faced with the following error:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 311296 bytes)

A common development practice is to keep a local web server running on your laptop, or a development/staging server. A feature of Drupal designed for multisite installations can actually help you out in this situation.

Different servers often mean different databases, database users, and passwords. Sometimes, you may also need to point to a different files/ directory or tmp/ directory, especially if you are moving between Windows to Linux, or a local machine to a server.

Sometimes in our lives, we all have pain, we all have sorrow. And sometimes we also have to launch Drupal sites into the wild blue yonder. It's during these times that we separate the grown-ups from the n00bs, and we see how well our site performs under heavy load. Many of us didn't need to worry about speed, page size, and server load in our younger years when we were building sites for Uncle Don and Aunt Sue, but eventually you get that big client, and you need some help.

Testing your site's performance

There are several ways to test, and a few metrics to acquaint yourself with. Not all metrics are created equal, but all of them are important at one time or other. In Part I of this post, you will be reading about testing with the Apache Benchmark tool on the command line.