I have been reading The Pragmatic Programmer and just finished the Concurrency chapter.
One of my favorite development tasks is performance engineering. I love taking an application and analyzing it to increase performance. Application performance monitoring (APM) tools like New Relic and Blackfire.io are tools every developer should have in their toolkit.
At DrupalCon Dublin I caught Fabianx’s presentation on streaming and other awesome performance techniques. His presentation explained how BigPipe worked to me, finally. It also made me aware of the fact that, in Drupal, we have mechanisms to do expensive procedures after output has been flushed to the browser.
The process of debugging can be a difficult one, and the process of troubleshooting performance even more so. Luckily there are some great tools out there to help with improving the performance of web applications.
I've been working on a Docker tool for local environments and one of the tools is setting up the ability to easily generate flamegraphs. I figure the best test run would be to dive into some basic info on the performance of a front page load for a typical Drupal Commerce site.
I use my personal server as a guinnea pig to push my server administrative skills to the edge and help bleed as much performance out of Drupal. So not even an hour and a half ago I signed up for New Relic and installed their monitoring daemon on my server. And I'm in love. The installation was ridiculously easy that even a novice who is scared of the terminal could pull it off.