MySQL

If you haven't already heard, Drupal 7 will default to using the InnoDB storage engine instead of MyISAM for MySQL (though a MyISAM database will continue to work just fine in Drupal 7). This is fairly substantial change within Drupal core, and as the thread in the issue queue I linked to shows, there were a lot of questions and apprehension about it. However...

...we are going to just skip over a lot of that apprehension and get down to point of this article - there's no good reason not to hop right into using InnoDB today on your Drupal 5 or Drupal 6 site. The rewards are; a possibly significant improvement in performance, a definite improvement in scalability (most highly trafficked Drupal sites have been using InnoDB for some time now because of this), and you'll start getting used to working with what will be more and more common in your Drupal-life, InnoDB.

My experience
I came to the conclusion about how great InnoDB is after researching the experiences of others, and after converting a large Pressflow-driven Drupal 5 site from InnoDB vs MyISAM. This change resulted in a 14% increased throughput during load tests performed in JMeter. That's a very substantial increase, and while everyone's mileage will vary based on their own site, server, and any number of variables it's clear enough to me that there's nothing to be afraid of as far as InnoDB goes (quite the contrary).

Converting your database to InnoDB
Before you go any further backup your database before doing any steps below. If you 'splode your database for any reason, you'll need it.

I made this script and the database backup, dump, and SVN commit script because I was determined to spend as little time as possible doing sysadmin while setting up dev and staging sites, so that I could spend as much time as possible developing (e.g., the fun stuff). With one command the script can:

• 'svn up' a version controlled database, and upload it to your database
• Run queries against database to set preferred site defaults
• 'svn up' site docroot
• Copy over fresh "files" directory from another site (e.g., production). Note, not a good option if you have your "files" directory version controlled.
• Set owner:group file permissions on all site files

This script is useful for keeping a database within reach of an 'svn up' anywhere it needs to be deployed (e.g., dev and staging sites). In addition to creating a database dump, it also svn commits the database. I use it in conjuction with this provisioning / install script, but it can be used on its own.

How to
The script should go in non-public, secure directory, which is somewhere below the site doc root. I haven't tried running it with permissions less than sudo, though it may be possible. Invoke by doing:

sh path/to/dump_and_checkin.sh

It has logging and verbose output for confirmation of it's operations on the command line.

Future possiblities includes doing something like this to cut down on the size of the diffs committed, but since haven't gotten a chance to test that in a prodcution environment, am sticking with with plain-and-simple in order to guarantee integrity of the SQL file.

The Drupal forum.module has become, well, somewhat infamous for less than awesome scalability. Recently I had a chance to see this firsthand, and track down a solution for managing the long page load times for a client who has a highly trafficked forum. This was not a case of a site that was un-tuned - actually this particular site had a lot of good work and performance enhancements already done to it, including block caching and even some modifications to the forum module that were allowing to work better than it would have without them. But still 5-6 second page load times on /forum persisted.