1. High Performance Drupal
Making Your Site Fast Fast Fast

2. Drupal Is Powerful

3. Drupal is Slow

4. Databases are Slow

5. PHP Is Slow

6. Consumer-Grade Networks Are
Slow

7. Increasing Speed Means Diving
Less Deeply Into The Stack

8. Fast Is Making Fewer Requests
From Faster Sources

9. The Life Of A Pageload
• Browser Request
• Browser Cache?
• Network Request
• Server Response
• Associated Assets (back to top)

10. Optimizing For The Browser
• Make Your HTML/CSS Images Efficient
• Use CSS/JS Aggregation
• Use a CDN
• Yslow is good for profiling this

11. Optimizing Server Response
• Reverse Proxy/Drupal Page Cache
• PHP OpCode Cache
• Drupal System Cache

12. Reverse-Proxies Are Very Fast

13. Faster Than Apache

14. Much Faster Than Drupal

15. Don’t Bother Your Power Tools
With Simple Tasks

16. Implementing Varnish
• Use Pressflow
• Implement A Simple VCL Based On Sessions
• Enable Aggressive Caching
• Enjoy, Experiment, Excel

17. OpCode Caching Keeps Drupal
Loaded In Memory

18. Don’t Touch The Disk

19. Don’t Load Up Apache Threads
With Copies of Drupal

20. Implementing APC
• The Biggest/Cheapest Win
• Install via apt-get, yum, or pecl
• Monitor with apc.php
• Lots of modules? Bump the SHM size
• Enable apc.stat=0 with caution

21. Drupal Freezes It’s Code Before
Launch

22. Most Real-World Scaling
Information Comes After Release

23. Drupal Supports A Crazy Array Of
Use Cases

24. $5/month Shared Hosting Is Not
High Performance

25. Pressflow
• “Pressflow Makes Drupal Scale”
• Drop-in Replacement For Core
• Backports many Drupal 7 features
• PHP 5.x/MySQL 5.x Required
• Enables robust reverse-proxy, mysql replication and more
• Runs drupal.org and many other high-performance sites

26. Drupal Has A Cache And That Is
Good

27. But... Drupal’s Cache Is In The
Database

28. And Serialized.

29. That Works Anywhere, But Is Both
Slow and Expensive

30. CacheRouter
• Use settings.php to plug in cacherouter instead of /includes/cache.inc
• Pick your poison: APC, XCache, Memcached, Filesystem, or classic db
caching.
• Change caches per table.
• Vital for high-speed logged-in pageloads.

31. Coming Soon: Advcache
• Cache Nodes, Users, Taxonomy Terms and other common objects via
cacherouter.
• Extends the notion of drupal’s static cache to whole objects.
• Still in development, but if you’re into writing patches...

32. Other Tips
• Search is among the slowest and most expensive queries. Use Solr
instead.
• InnoDB can help with locking in MySQL
• Hardware is faster and often more cost effective than code cleanup.
• Monitor load and scale ahead of problems.

33. Benchmarking/Profiling
• Cachegrind to profile code.
• Jmeter to simulate load.
• Slow Query logs, cactai, etc.

34. Vertical/Horizntal Scaling
• Start with all services you need.
• Separate services into layers.
• Add more servers at each layer as needed.
• Shameless plug: Project Mercury: http://getpantheon.com

36. More Resources
• http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance
• http://pressflow.org
• http://tag1consulting.com
• http://2bits.com
• http://getpantheon.com