Leveraging Drupal with Pressflow for high performance sites

Pressflow is a fork of Drupal built with enhanced performance, scalability, and data integrity.

The very basic approach to building a highly performant site is to make the fewest HTTP Requests possible.

Pressflow comes built in with CSS and Javascript aggregation to minimise the number of requests for these static files.

Pressflow supports database replication and features a smart session and page caching architecture. It also takes advantage of Reverse Proxy Caching support by using open source softwares like Squid and Varnish to accelerate static content.

Replication in MySQL is used to copy data from a master server to other slave servers, so that spreading the load among multiple servers improves performance.

More information about pressflow is available from :

http://fourkitchens.com/pressflow-makes-drupal-scale