Jeff Sheltren, Narayan Newton, and Nathaniel Catchpole literally "wrote the book" on High Performance Drupal (in fact, that's what it's called). Using the book as a guide, I will sherpa you through all the information out there on Drupal performance.
This session is intended as a broad overview of the various tools that are available to you for identifying, diagnosing, and remedying performance issues on your Drupal site. Much like a doctor, we need to first identify the symptoms, then the underlying causes, then design an approach to fixing it, referring to statistics to monitor the situation. Tools and methods at each of these stages will be presented.
Here's some buzzwords that might be of interest: Nginx, CDNs, SPOFs, caching, reverse proxy, xdebug, xhprof, scaling, monitoring, config management, Memcache, Solr, load testing. We'll explain 'em all!
At the end of the presentation, you should have a good baseline reference of what tools are good for what job, but not necessarily an understanding of how to implement any particular one. We'll be discussing strategy more than implementation.