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Today completed the three day performance adventure with the Lullabots. Rock solid, all the way. (should rhyme with "double rainbow, all the way").

The most important takeaway for the day is the idea that any Drupal user, from the most high powered enterprise user to the dabbler with a $7 bargain-basement shared hosting account, can take some specific steps to improve the performance on their Drupal sites. No matter who you are, if you're using Drupal you have the tools to make it better.

There is a flip side, of course.

Yesterday was Day 2 of the Lullabot Rock Solid Drupal training -- and day 3 is about to start. It's been a heady collection of serious tools that a dabbler like me hasn't really had a reason to work with before, but it's very impressive to see.  

One of the things that sets folks running high-powered sites apart is that they avoid using any sort of GUI (graphic user interface) on their production servers -- all of the memory and processor power used to make pretty windows and check boxes can be better used to deliver web pages to users, after all.  

All right, it's been a long day at Rock Solid Drupal with the Lullabots.  And probably the one during which I've seen the most dramatic changes in what is possible in creating the right sort of environment for a drupal site to really scream.  

I'm playing with the big dogs today. 

Today I'm starting a week of Lullabot's "Rock Solid Drupal" -- a week of training on running high performance, scalable drupal. Lullabot co-founder Matt Westgate and co-hosts Randy Fay and James Sansbury are going drag my dopey, fat, self-taught-drupal-poser butt into the big time and show us how to run sites that don't give users time to wonder if they've left the iron on between page loads.  

When I was just getting started with Drupal -- at least, when I was trying to make a living using drupal as the core of my development work, I attended a week of Lullabot training in Providence, Rhode Island.  I'd been listening to the Lullabot podcast for a while, but I had no idea how incredibly helpful and empowering a week of training could be.