Performance Tuning Apache and MySQL for Drupal
http://drupal.org/node/215516
‘ve been working on the performance of my Drupal site and thought I’d share my results to date in case they might help someone else. My baseline performance using out-of-the-box settings was around 28 requests per second, and the end result is a rate of 68 requests per second.
The site, www.kidpub.com, is lightly loaded, with between 400 and 600 visits per day for a total of 3,000 to 4000 pageviews per day. The system is a dedicated 1.8GHz Celeron with 500M RAM and a 100M ethernet. It’s running CentOS. Apache is 2.0.52. Latest build of Drupal 5 and MySQL 5.
I looked at three main areas for performance tweaking: Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Most of the changes are pretty simple but result in good performance gains.