Performance on a budget (European Drupal Days 2015)

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Performance on a budget

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Speaker Info
Chris Jansen
Drupal developer
chris@ibuildings.nl

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About me

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• What is performance?
• Method
• Performance improvements & examples
Topics

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• Measurable performance
• Page load time
• Resource usage
• Response time
• Perceived performance
• Rendering of useful content
• Activity feedback
What is performance?

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Method
Define key
content
Set goals
Verify result
Improve
performance

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What is your visitor looking for?
• Conversion pages
• Landing pages
• Key information
• etc.
Define key content

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How should your key content be served.
Be as S.M.A.R.T. as possible.
Examples:
Set goals
Specific
Measurable
Acceptable
Realistic
Time-bound
• A search query should not take more than 350ms.
• The homepage’s first view should be fully loaded in under 3seconds, repeat
views in under 1,5 second.

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Improve performance
Identify
bottlenecks
Brainstorm
improvements
Verify results
Implement
improvement

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What components make up this page?
• Custom code/exotic modules required?
• Many or expensive SQL Queries?
• Many images?
• etc.
Improve performance - Identify Bottlenecks

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Make a list of possible improvements.
Do:
• think out of the box
• think about the generation process
Improve performance - Brainstorm improvements
Do not (initially):
• look at code
• look at configuration

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1. Measure current performance
• PHP profiling
• Browser request timeline
• Apache Benchmark
2. Make one change
• Highest expected gain first
Improve performance - Implement improvement

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1. Compare new performance to previously measured performance.
• No improvement? -> Discard the change -> Next iteration
2. Compare new performance to goals.
• Still sub-par performance? -> Next iteration
• Performance meets goals? -> Little victory dance!
Improve performance - Verify results

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Do the results meet your goals?
Did you find structural improvement possibilities?
Verify result

Performance improvements and examples

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1. Reduce page load time
1. Reduce number of requests
2. Optimise code
2. Reduce resource usage & response time
1. Optimise configuration
2. Queue expensive operations
3. Offloading the database
4. Caching
Measurable performance

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Why?
• Fetching resources takes time
• Each request takes up server resources
• Especially requests requiring Drupal.
Measurable performance - Reduce number of requests

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How?
• Combine images used in css into 1 sprite.
• Remove unused javascript/css
Measurable performance - Reduce number of requests

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Remove unused javascript/css

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• Caching expensive operations
• static $variable;
• $variable = drupal_static();
• Reduce database queries
Measurable performance - Optimise code

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Caching expensive operations

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Measurable performance - Reduce database queries

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• Disable/uninstall
• Unused modules
• Development modules (devel, devel_themer, etc.)
• UI modules (views_ui, field_ui, *_ui, etc.)
• Sometimes 3 specific modules beat 1 multipurpose
Measurable performance - Optimise configuration

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• Views
• Enable query caching
• Replace simple views blocks by custom blocks
• Log using syslog instead of dblog
Measurable performance - Optimise configuration

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• Sending e-mails
• Generating PDF files
• Aggregating votes/reviews/etc.
Measurable performance - Queue expensive operations
From planet Drupal, 17 march 2015: 
www.computerminds.co.uk/drupal-code/drupal-queues

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1. Change caching backend
• Memcache(d)
• Redis
2. Change search engine
• Solr
• Elasticsearch
Measurable performance - Offloading the database

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1. Drupal page cache
2. Drupal modules
1. Entity cache
2. Render cache
3. Browser caching (ETags, Expires, Vary, etc.)
Measurable performance - Caching

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Supporting software/extensions
1. Opcode caching (APC)
2. Varnish
3. Memcache(d)/Redis

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Why mention caching last?
Well… You can forget about caching when:
• A session is opened
• Any cookie is present (non-configured Varnish)

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1. Rendering of useful content
1. Relocate (and defer) javascript
2. Lazyloading
2. Activity feedback
1. Throbber
2. Progress bar
Perceived performance

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Perceived performance - Relocate javascript

What to take away from this talk?

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• Performance is context dependent
• Focus on your goals
• Think about performance while developing
• But don’t optimise before your code works]
What to take away?

Thank you,  
Any questions?

Performance on a budget (European Drupal Days 2015)

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