Drupal performance optimization best practices include: - Disabling unused modules and cron on production to reduce overhead - Configuring caching at the application level with modules like Boost and Memcache - Optimizing server configuration through APC caching, CDN integration, browser caching, and cron job configuration - Improving database performance by optimizing InnoDB settings and enabling the query cache The document provides best practices for optimizing Drupal performance at the application, server, and database levels to reduce bottlenecks and improve load times.

1. Drupal Performance Optimization
Best Practices
July 4, 2014
Ratnesh Kumar

2. 2
Overview
• Drupal Performance
• Know the tools for performance Analysis
• Best Practices for Performance Optimization
– Application Level
– Server Configuration
– Database Configuration
• Common mistakes which causes Performance
bottlenecks

3. Drupal Performance
• Performance bottlenecks is a major issue with Drupal based
application
• Common understanding among people, product stakeholders
and web developers is:
 Drupal is not a right choice for large application with lot
of users and content.
 It consumes lot of memory and resources.
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Drupal Performance
Why Drupal is Slow?
• Because it’s not configured/deployed correctly…
• Contents are dynamic not static.
• Bootstrap process is complex where series of events occurs
behind the scene:
 Establishing a database connection
 Loading all settings and modules
 Initializing a user session
 Mapping the URL to page callback
 Render the Page (theme initialization)
On every single page request all the above events occurs in backend.

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Drupal Performance
When do you think about performance?
(Before/After Development)
 Discuss and freeze the performance related NFRs carefully
under requirement document, before starting the development.
 Set a goal for performance which needs to be achieved.
 Finalize Caching strategies.

6. Tools for performance Analysis

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Tools for performance Analysis
 www.webpagetest.org
Google pageSpeed (Chrome add ons)
 Yslow (Firefox add ons)
 Apache Benchmarking
 www.whichloadfaster.com (compare with other sites)
 Drupal module – Devel
 top/htop ……. and lots more

8. Best Practices - Application Level

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Best Practices - Application Level
 Disable and Delete unused and non-essential modules
 Disable the Update Manager module on Production.
 Database logging (dblog) is enabled by default in Drupal 7, and errors can
fill up your database quickly.
 A better solution is to fix all PHP notices and warnings to reduce logging
overhead.

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Best Practices - Application Level
 Put JS at the bottom of the page.
 Custom JS/CSS should be added in the application only using
drupal_add_js() and drupal_add_css() function respectively.
 Aggregate and minify JS/CSS file through Drupal Admin.
 Use the Fast 404 module to serve static 404s for image, icon,
CSS, or other static files, rather than bootstrapping Drupal.

11. Best Practices – Server Configuration

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
 Cache PHP with APC(Alternative PHP cache)
 Cache everything to reduce the page load time for
anonymous user (Boost, Memcache/Varnish).

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
 Configure CRON to be executed at a certain timestamp in a day, instead of
executing this on every request. Drupal executes cron hook on every page request.
 CDN Integration – to store all static files e.g. css, js and images.
 Leverage browser caching
 Optimize images to reduce the total page size.

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
 Boost + Memcache – Works best in most of the case as it
solves performance issue for anonymous and authenticated user
both
Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and
scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic
 Precache everything through warmup script
 Use cache-expire module to update cache on node insert/update/detele.

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Best Practices – Server Configuration

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• Memcache
You can use the Memcache module to move some common cache queries out of the database
and into memory. Information held in memory will always be retrieved more quickly than
information retrieved from a database query.
• APC (Alternative PHP Cache)
 PHP is an interpreted language, which means the files have to be reduced down into
opcodes in order to actually be executed by the server.
 Once APC is installed on the server and configured, it will store the intermediate code of
PHP files in memory so that every request does not result in fetching all those PHP files off disk
and interpreting the files every time.

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• Integrate CDN to store all static files(JS/Images/CSS)
A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple
locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to
a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• Leverage Brower Caching
 What browser caching does:
 “Remember" the resources that the browser has already loaded. When a visitor goes to
another page on your website your logo or CSS file does not need to be loaded again,
because the browser has them "remembered". The end result is that your pages load
much faster.
 Browser caching can be enabled with few configuration added in the .htaccess file on the
server.
• Set expiry time of static contents
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
# Enable expirations.
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 month"

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• Leverage Brower Caching
• Set max-age header
<FilesMatch "(.js.gz|.css.gz)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2678400, public"
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 month“
 Requirements:
• mod_expire and mod_header modules needs to be installed and enabled on the
server(Apache).

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• CRON Configuration
Misconfiguration of CRON settings results into major performance issue as Drupal executes all
the cron hooks on every single page request by default.
 Configure CRON to be executed at a certain timestamp in a day
 Elysia cron module works perfectly for configuring cron.
 It extends Drupal standard cron, allowing a fine grain control over each task and several
ways to add custom cron jobs to your site.

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Best Practices – Server Configuration
• CRON Configuration
 Configuration on Server side:
Connect to server through ssh
Login as root user (sudo su)
Command to view/edit crontab file
 crontab –l (to view the list of cron script configured on the server)
 crontab –e (opens the crontab configuration)
Add the below line to excute the cron at 2:10 AM daily
10 2 * * * /usr/bin/wget -O - -q -t 1
http://www.createdbespoke.com/sites/all/modules/community/elysia_cron/cron.php?cr
on_key=sfaslsfklsfjlksfjlfsaf
Save the file and quit – wq

22. Best Practices – Database

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Best Practices – Database
 Do not use InnoDB for the semaphore table, use Memory
ALTER TABLE semaphore ENGINE=MEMORY;
 innodb_buffer_pool_size 70-80% of memory is a safe bet. I set it to 12G on 16GB box.
 innodb_log_file_size – This depends on your recovery speed needs but 256M seems to be a
good balance between reasonable recovery time and good performance
 innodb_log_buffer_size=4M is good for most cases unless you’re piping large blobs to Innodb
in this case increase it a bit.

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Best Practices – Database
 Enable MySQL query cache (i.e. query_cache_size)
 Find Slow query through slow query log file.
 Create indexes to optimize the query

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Questions?
Questions?

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Thanks… 