Patching core for performance

Overview

The stock Drupal core has a number of bottlenecks and limitations for high-traffic and enterprise deployment. Many of the top Drupal sites maintain internal, patched versions of Drupal. While each of these internal versions is custom-built, the patches applied and techniques used to maintain the patches are consistent across these sites.

Agenda

* Popular patches used by high-traffic sites
* When these patches will be in core (or why they're not in core)
* Patch conflicts to watch for
* Deployment strategies to eliminate or minimize downtime caused by necessary changes to support the patch changes
* How to use version control systems to efficiently maintain a patched core without falling behind when the standard core applies security and bug patches. The demonstration will be using bazaar-ng (bzr).
* Other community resources for making this work easier
* Case studies in patching core for performance

Patches/modules considered

* Master/slave replication
* memcached
* Cache Router
* Removing LOWER()
* Database lock removal
* Possibly others

Goals

Attendees should leave with the following capabilities:
* How to decide whether patching core is worth the trouble
* How to maintain a patched core

Resources

Attendees should be familiar with applying patches and using version control systems.