Speeding up your Drupal site

Speeding up your Drupal site by Ronan Berder (Wiredcraft, Managing Director)

The why and the what
Front end
Deliver content to users quickly
Optimize use of network
Back end
Quickly generate content
Optimize server resources

Some guidelines
Keep things simple; add complexity incrementally
Scale vertically and then horizontally ONLY IF NEEDED
Most important: users, not system administrators
Optimizing your code is a huge part of the equation

Identifying your bottlenecks
Get familiar with shell; uptime, netstat, ps aux,
Problem: Network? Disk? CPU? Memory?
Source: Web server? App server? DB?
Caching is not the “Blue Powder”, caching adds complexity
For the long run, you'll need monitoring; Zabbix, Cacti, Nagios...

Optimizing your Web server
The basics;
Remove unnecessary modules
Clean up your configuration; MPM, MaxClients, MaxRequestsPerChild, KeepAlive...
There are alternatives; Lighttpd, NGINX
Stress test (Apache Benchmark)

Optimizing your Application server
As usual, clean up your configuration
Add opcode; APC, Xcache, eAccelerator
FastCGI; PHP-FPM and PHP-FCGI

Optimizing your Database server
As usual, clean up your configuration
Check for slow queries
Add caching; Memcached
Scale horizontally; Master/Slave replication
You'll probably want to look into Cacherouter and Pressflow

What is Pressflow
Patched version of Drupal
Runs Drupal.org
Only works with PHP5 and MySQL
Works with M/S replication and reverse-proxy

Adding more caching
Reverse proxy; usually Varnish
File caching; Boost
Block caching; Block Cache Alter
....
Be aware that authenticated caching is much more complex

The real big thing
Caching is fine, but people tend to forget the biggest bottleneck: the code
Too many modules (feature creep)
Poor code, slow queries
“Bad” modules (usually results from “bad” engineering)
Code profiling; xdebug, xhprof

Dealing with the situation
Get things under control;
Quick wins; Opcode, Memcached
Cleanup your configuration
Cache anonymous traffic (Boost)
Clean up the mess
Take things form there

Next step; front end
Complete other topic, but many things you can consider; CSS/JS aggregation, parallelization, CDN, Gzip compression, sprites, image optimization...
Guess what; code is also a big deal here. Optimize!

Thank you! Now, questions?

Speeding up your Drupal site

by Ronan Berder on Aug 15, 2010

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Speeding up your Drupal site Presentation Transcript