I've been trying to improve the performance of my Drupal sites for the longest time. Finally, I've decided to jump in and give Project Mercury and Pressflow a crack. This is a log of that adventure.
If you visit the Project Mercury site or the Pantheon group on groups.drupal.org, the first thing you'll notice is that there's a serious lack of documentation and topics directed at mere mortal web developers. The posts there are either from people who eat, sleep and drink the LAMP stack (and hence write for one another) or people who are in way above their heads.
If you're like me, you've been developing websites for many years, have a journeyman's handle of the command-line. You've dabbled with server administration, but mostly avoided it due to whatever reason. In my case, I was too focused on development. You know that apache needs to be restarted every now and then, and you need to read a guide to do it. Everytime. You know there's a my.cnf file for mysql. You know there's a php.ini. Bottom line, you're technically capable, willing to dive in and get your hands dirty, but you lack experience.
If you're like me, then hopefully this site will be of some use to you.