A short overview of performance improvements that can be relatively easily be done with drupal.

1. Drupal Performance
Gabi Lee, Sergata
gabi.lee@sergata.com
+972-54-5444542

2. Agenda
• About
• What is “Performance”
• Measuring performance
• Recipes
– User
– Server
– Framework
– Application

3. About Sergata
• Innovative Software Development
• Focus: Innovation | Startups | Entrepreneurs
• From 0 to 100 in 3 months
• Large scale projects of over 4 years
• R&D Dream Team of 55 full time developers
• Over 150 innovative projects world wide since 2006

4. Drupal Sites

6. “Performance”?
• IT doesn’t matter
• Single user
– Total server time (App + DB)
– Time for page to load (render)
– Perceived performance
• Concurrent users
– Impact of multiple users on the single user
experience
• Analysis

8. Traffic
6,000/hour
30,000/hour

10. Measuring
• User
– Browsing the page…
– Your (non-IE) browser
– YSlow for FF
– http://www.webpagetest.org
• Load testing
– ab
– JMeter

11. YSlow
• Network
– Minimize HTTP Requests (Aggregation, Sprites)
– Use a Content Delivery Network (Domains)
– Gzip Components (CPU vs. Network)
• Caching
– Expires or a Cache-Control Header
– Make AJAX Cacheable
– Use GET for AJAX Requests
• Data
– Reduce the Number of DOM Elements
– Do Not Scale Images in HTML (Smush.it)

12. Content Types
• Cacheable content
– Images
– CSS/JS
– “Static” HTMLs
– Anonymous pages
• Personalized content
– Logged in users
– Session based data

13. Bypass Server
• How?
– CDN (AWS, Cotendo, CloudFlare, etc.)
– Boost
– Reverse proxy (Varnish, Squid)
– Expires header
• When?
– Resources - always
– Most traffic is anonymous
– Static, anonymous, landing pages

15. Drupal Configuration
• Performance tab

16. Modules
• Data access
– APC
– Memcache
• Caching
– Boost
– Block Cache Alter
– Varnish HTTP Accelerator Integration
• CDN
– Login Cookie
– CDN
• Others
– “ImageCache”

17. Application Optimization
• Use what you need
• Ajax
• Batch processing (e.g. analytics)
• SQL optimization
– Analysis
– Indexing
– No PHP<->DB loops (use DAL / Entity API)
– Configuration

18. IT Level
• Bigger servers
• More servers
– ELB on AWS
– Requires shared drive
• Opcode caching (APC)
• Apache config
– KeepAlive, modules, Expires, GZip

19. Bottom Line
• Analyze
•
• Use external tools
• Invest in configuration
• Don’t write code

20. Thank You!
Questions?
gabi.lee@sergata.com

21. References
• http://www.vmirgorod.name/blog/tuning-
drupal-performance
• http://fuseinteractive.ca/blog/drupal-
performance-tuning-0
• http://www.practicalclouds.com/content/guid
e/accelerate-your-drupal-website-vital-
performance-tuning
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

22. mail@sergata.com
+972-77-2103003
28 Baruch Hirsch St.
Bnei-Brak, 51202, Israel
http://www.sergata.com/en