These are some simple guidelines for setting up Drupal on a classic Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack that provides a fair amount of security for the rest of your system.

PHP Configuration

To start, some common PHP configuration options can be optimized. On some systems, these settings may already be set, but it never hurts to add them yourself just in case.

PHP settings can be controlled in a number of ways. If you have access to the php.ini configuration file (usually found at /etc/php.ini), you can simply edit this file to cause system-wide changes. If you'd prefer to make these changes just for your Drupal installation, however, the best place to do so is in your Drupal installation's settings.php file.

1. First, increase PHP's memory limit to avoid getting out-of-memory errors when you begin to add a few modules. These errors may look something like this:
   

   Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 8388608 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 30720 bytes) in /path/to/drupal/modules/system/system.module on line 1022

2. In your php.ini file, include a line that reads: memory_limit = 16M. Or…