Optimize a VPS server for Drupal Hosting

Varnish is a good tool for optimizing Drupal. It's one of several needed to optimize Drupal properly and I'm not convinced it's the most important one. APC does more, IMHO, is a simple installation with little or no configuration needed, and doesn't require additional resources. An optimal Varnish configuration for an enterprise website sits on a separate server. Most Drupal developers work on sites that would choke in the resources he's allocated. 256MB? In 2012? For a Drupal site? No wonder it crashed when he got significant traffic. Guess what? His Varnish implementation isn't enough to change that.

Drupal makes me crazy. There is a lot to like-- but out of the box Drupal 7 is a slow pig. And I'm getting tired of new versionitis. 6, 7, 8...please peeps, it's just PHP. Calm down.

LOL. I'm managing the mail server and website (and did the web design) for a political campaign in my area. I have Drupal 7 running on a VLS with three times the memory of the person who wrote the article with APC installed and some other optimization done. So far it's running well.

My big gripe with Drupal 7 is that things are done so differently from previous versions yet much of the documentation and tutorials are still all for Drupal 5 and 6 and are no help whatsoever. I get things done right eventually but it's been way too much trial and error. No need to reinvent the wheel on each release, folks.

No need to reinvent the wheel on each release, folks.

Such thinking is anathema to most software developers these days.

"We never did it that way before."

'Nuff said.

I have checked complete article statement regarding the use of Varnish and logged in users is inaccurate. Even when users are logged in, Varnish VCL is easily configured to cache static elements such as CSS, images and JS. Varnish VCL examples are rampant across the web for just these cases, especially for using Drupal. I think that you will find Varnish highly flexible in most use cases. Also, good recommendation for APC. It's just too easy to implement. i also find a briefed article about drupal on vps here http://www.vpswebserver.com/windows-vps/drupal-on-vps