Today was a great day. First off, the good Lord gave me another day on Earth to do His work. That’s a good start. I also came across a KB article from MediaTemple that provide great hope of some performance improvement on our grid service (gs) account. Now I came across this as a result of researching performance optmizations for Drupal on their dedicated virtuals (dv) that some of my clients sites run on.
I was so excited, I couldn’t wait to try it out. So, nothing too empirical other than firebug net download times with my browser cache cleaned out.
Test Instance with 8 blocks making up a single node page with 100 generated users.
* Before the optimizer was enabled: avg. 4.4 secs total
* After the optimizer was enabled: avg. 2.9 secs total
The change boils down to this:
Open your php.ini file for editing (KB: (gs) HOWTO: edit php.ini). Add these lines:
For PHP4 (Replace the x.x-x with the version number you want to use.)
> zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
> zend_extension=”/usr/local/php-4.x.x-x/zend/ZendOptimizer.so”
For PHP5 (Replace the x.x-x with the version number you want to use.)
> zend_optimizer.optimization_level=15
> zend_extension=”/usr/local/php-5.x.x-x/zend/ZendOptimizer.so”
Save the changes and quit.
That’s a decent improvement with all things considered. There are plenty of other optimization items that can be done, but since this site provide zero income, I’m not ready to pay any more for some of those non-free options. 
I guess that leaves me with Drupal caching support, ZendOptimizer and MySQL Table optimization and indexing. No MySQL containers for me. If I ever move, it will probably be straight to a (dv).
Blessings!
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