Hey forum - I've got my second Linode up and running using Project Mercury on Debian Lenny (drupal 6).

We are getting ready to launch a site that will grow probably to 30,000 users in a niche market.

I need to read up ASAP on performance tuning and system maintenance. My past has been Novell and Windows server administration, but not Linux, MySQL, Varnish, Memcache, Pressflow and all of this stuff.

The Linode documents have helped me start learning setting this up from scratch, but I need to understand much more.

Need recommendations on books, online documents, etc. that are from good authors.

Anything appreciated!

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kyler d. boudreau
theatereleven.com

I am in the same boat as you except starting further back in the learning curve. Have you found any good resources? How is your progress?

I just ordered a couple books on my own after reviewing them on Amazon, but I've only ready part of one of them: Cracking Drupal - A Drop In The Bucket.

Thinking abou just freaking paying a Drupal Mercury person to give me a run down on stuff as opposed to hunting and hunting online.

The high performance and mercury groups are good at drupal.org are good. I've loved Linode as a VPS provider. Their docs, etc. rock.

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kyler d. boudreau

theatereleven.com

As always the O'Reilly books are pretty good.

Get the O'Reilly Apache Cookbook. Apache, The Definitive Guide has some good stuff in it but it's very poorly organized, IMHO.

IMHO, the book for all things MySQL, both programming and administering a server, is MySQL by Paul DuBois from Developer's Library. It's had a 4th edition out for a good while now but I've still just got the 3rd. It's the only MySQL book I've ever needed and I both run LAMP servers and write code using it nearly every day.

Apache's own documentation is very through and you should familiarize yourself with it.

Likewise, Debian is the best source for much of its own documentation.

Debian Lenny willl EOL and lose security support in less than a year. I strongly recommend upgrading to squeeze.

Debian Wiki: http://wiki.debian.org/
Debian Documentation: http://www.debian.org/doc/
Apache documentation (find the right page for your version)
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/

Note that Debian has many system tools for controlling Apache that override the default ones that come with Apache itself.

use 'invoke-rc.d apache2 <command>' to start, stop, and otherwise control the server.

use a2enmod, a2dismod, a2ensite and a2dissite to enable and disable modules and site configuration snippits.

When it comes to performance tuning a server for a high bandwidth ap, I'm not aware of any books. There are simply too many variables than can come into play and it becomes as much an art as a science.

I made a few Drupal sites before switching to Concrete5 and later Django. The key things I remember to getting tolerable performance was throwing a ton of RAM at MySQL, using apache's static content caching, and opcode caching for php