How To Improve Performance Of Your Drupal Web Site


by Timi Ogunjobi - Date: 2010-07-09 - Word Count: 1158 Share This!

Some months ago after the publication of my second Drupal book Drupal 6 Site Blueprints a Drupal disciple called me up and asked :
"Rabbi, my ass is grass; what can I do to take my megacool site to internet heaven? It is damn too slow".
"What have you got running on it ?", I asked him.
"Oh, it's got tons of modules installed; it can do practically everything", he proudly told me.
"Dude, you have sinned", I rebuked him.

Thus the most useful advice that most people will need to take is contained in chapter 2 of the book Drupal 6 Performance Tips from Packt publishing- that is, disable all modules and themes that are not in use or that are not useful. When Drupal has to load with masses of code components and CSS that you don't actually need it doesn't take a rocket scientist to predict that it will run slower; and who the heck wants to wait for ages for your dot-in-the-cloud website to load?

Having said this, I will go further to declare that Drupal 6 Performance Tips from Packt publishing is one of the most exciting Drupal books that I have read for some time. The book aims to teach readers how to maximize and optimize their Drupal framework using Drupal 6 best practice performance solutions and tools. And it does this appreciably well.

Chapter 1 is about upgrading your present installation if you have one. To run a high performance and secure Drupal website, you need to keep your Drupal core code and your contributed Drupal module code patched and upgraded regularly. The Drupal project frequently releases updated security patches to its core code and it should be a standard maintenance workflow for a Drupal developer to keep their site patched to the latest core Drupal release. This will prevent security issues on the site and it will help to improve your site's performance, as these patch releases fix minor and major issues reported from Drupal's bug tracking tools. Many performance issues and security issues with the Drupal code are fixed on a weekly to monthly basis by Drupal developers working with the Drupal project.

Chapter 2 is about maintaining your Drupal site. This chapter shows a selection of best practice Drupal maintenance tips and tricks that can be enabled using the core Drupal administration interface. These performance enhancements helps to run a powerful and well-maintained Drupal site. Such maintenance include running cron , tweaking php.ini and htaccess , and also backing up the site through phpmyadmin or contributed backup modules.

Chapter 3 shows how to use development modules and tools. One of the most important of these modules is the Devel module which can be used to monitor performance on a Drupal site and to assist in locating bottlenecks. The Devel module can be used to quickly gather detailed information on your site's theme elements, monitor your site's page loads and database queries, generate test content for your site, and give you easy methods for clearing your site's theme registry and performance cache. It's an essential tool for the performance-minded Drupal developer. In this chapter the reader will also see how the site logs access entries and how the log entries can be viewed to troubleshoot performance issues.

Chapter 4 is about Performance Optimization . It teaches how to throttle modules and blocks your site in order to increase performance and reduce server load during high traffic periods. This is done using the Throttle module. This chapter also returns to a discussion of the Devel module and how it can be used to generate dummy content, users, and taxonomy categories for a development site. In summary this chapter shows how to use the Development module to generate taxonomy, users, and content; how to run Views 2.x for best performance, including how to clear your Views cache; Panels module caching mechanisms and how to maintain your Panels cache.

Chapter 5 shows how to use DB maintenance and BOOST modules. DB Maintenance will allow you to maintain and optimize your MySQL database from within the Drupal admin interface. Boost will help to speed up page load times on your site for your anonymous site users by using its sophisticated and advanced page, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript caching mechanisms. Both of these contributed modules will help you diagnose problems on your site and server as well as help to keep your site running smoothly and in an optimized fashion. These are not required modules, but rather are recommended modules to add to your Drupal performance arsenal.

While Chapter 5 gives a taster on Boost module, Chapter 6 discusses it in more details by showing how to use some of the module's advanced settings and its configuration. Such advanced functionality discussed includes the Boost cache settings, crawler and htaccess. The chapter also shows how to use additional modules such as Global Redirect and Transliteration modules to improve the effectiveness of Boost.

Chapter 7 tells the reader about Memcache API and Integration. These two modules allow for more granular and advanced cache configurations within your site. While Chapters 5 and 6, shows how to use the Boost module to enable advanced caching for anonymous site visitors, this chapter and also Chapter 8,shows the best methods of enabling caching for authenticated users, and investigate how to get even more control and flexibility over the Drupal caching system using contributed modules.

Chapter 8 talks about Advanced Caching and Contributed Modules for Caching. Such modules include Cache Router, Authenticated User Page Caching, Advanced Cache, APC (Alternative PHP Cache), File Cache, and so on. The chapter again discusses Drupal caching mechanisms and takes a detailed look at this group of contributed caching modules which effectively allow for more granular and advanced cache configurations within your Drupal site. The focus of this chapter therefore is mainly how to use contributed caching modules that work and integrate well with Drupal 6.x sites, and how best to implement these modules, first in a development or sandbox type of hosting environment, with the flexibility to implement them later in practice on production websites. .

Chapter 9 deals primarily with issues pertaining to Multisite Configuration and Performance. Here the authors show how to set up and configure a Drupal multisite environment on a localhost development server. The benefits to running a multisite installation include allowing multisites to share one Drupal database and core module configuration, or to share a core module configuration and allow each site to have its own database. The reader will also learn how multisite installations can help to boost performance for the overall Drupal configuration and help inprove performance on your server whether it be a shared or dedicated server environment.

As previously mentioned, this could be one of the most useful Drupal books that you can ever buy. This is primarily because building a gee-whiz site is not just enough anymore. It needs to be user-friendly too, else it will soon become history. I will recommend this book Drupal 6 Performance Tips for any serious Drupal developer.

Related Tags: book, drupal, joomla, packt

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