This document discusses the findings from a performance census of over 2000 Drupal sites, highlighting the common challenges in application speed and response times. It emphasizes the limitations of traditional hosting solutions and the significant impact of I/O performance on overall site speed. The document also suggests leveraging PHP 7 and exploring caching improvements to enhance performance in future development efforts.

1. Drupal Performance
Census: Live Lessons
From Over 2000 Sites
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2. Josh Koenig
Co-Founder
Head of Product
pantheon.io
drupal.org/user/3313
@outlandishjosh
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Efficient Dev Teams + Elastic Platform

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10. Pantheon.io
Traditional Hosting
Even “fanatical” support
can’t help with your app.
Happy to reboot the box!
CMS Support Spectrum: What’s Missing?
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“IaaS”
On your own vs the
Zombie Apocalypse.
Good luck!
Managed CMS
Sacrifice developer velocity to
“guarantee” the application.
Sorry, you can’t deploy that.

11. Pantheon.io
Traditional Hosting
Even “fanatical” support
can’t help with your app.
Happy to reboot the box!
CMS Support Spectrum: What’s Missing?
11
“IaaS”
On your own vs the
Zombie Apocalypse.
Good luck!
Managed CMS
Sacrifice developer velocity to
“guarantee” the application.
Sorry, you can’t deploy that.
?

12. 12
There’s a better way to do this...

13. Pantheon.io
New Relic APM Pro: Launched June 26th
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17. Pantheon.io
How the Data Flows
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PHP
new_relic.so
Data Cloud
rpm.newrelic.com
Collector
newrelic.daemon
On Pantheon In New Relic

18. Pantheon.io
What That Looks Like
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19. Pantheon.io
New Relic Measures App Execution
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20. Pantheon.io
Reverse-Proxy is Effectively Light-Speed
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21. Pantheon.io
This Is Where The APM Action Is
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27. Get the Data Already!
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28. Pantheon.io
Census Methodology
● Actual Population: ~2000 sites ~3M transactions
● Mid-day one-hour data samples
● Queried out of New Relic’s API and then stored in MySQL
● Data Captured:
⌾ Total Throughput & response time
⌾ Query count & response time
⌾ External call count & response time
⌾ Views call count & response time
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Only the names have
been changed, to
protect the innocent.
Just the facts,
maam. Just the
facts.

31. Pantheon.io
On Average: pretty good!
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32. Pantheon.io
On Average: pretty good!
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33. Pantheon.io
But… Painfully Slow at Times
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34. Pantheon.io
Throughput and Performance Correlate
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35. Pantheon.io
I/O is Still The Big Pain Point
> SELECT name, call_count, average_response_time, nrm.max_response_time FROM
New_relic_metrics WHERE application_id = 513593
+-------------------------+------------+-----------------------+-------------------+
| name | call_count | average_response_time | max_response_time |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------------------+-------------------+
| WebTransactionTotalTime | 4628 | 2570 | 426000.0000 |
| External/all | 7236 | 317 | 5000.0000 |
| Datastore/MySQL/all | 858749 | 1 | 1120.0000 |
| Datastore/Redis/all | 1757799 | 1 | 426.0000 |
+-------------------------+------------+-----------------------+-------------------+
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36. Pantheon.io
Views Isn’t a Kiss of Death
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37. Pantheon.io
Views Isn’t a Kiss of Death
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38. Pantheon.io
Views Isn’t a Kiss of Death
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39. Pantheon.io
SQL Queries vs Avg Page Response
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41. Pantheon.io
External API Calls
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42. Pantheon.io
External API Calls
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45. Pantheon.io
Long Loops and PHP Can Also Kill You
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● Page responses 30s +
● No significant DB activity
● No web external calls
● ??????
● Stack trace shows lots of
calls to form cache
● One REST API endpoint
rendering ~1500 nodes
(including building edit
forms)

46. Looking Ahead
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47. Pantheon.io
PHP 7 is Full of Win
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48. Pantheon.io
PHP 7 is Full of Win
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49. Pantheon.io
LCache is (potentially) full of win
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50. Pantheon.io
LCache is (potentially) full of win
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51. Pantheon.io
● Gather more data on Drupal 8
● Identifying modules associated w/slowness
● Build/measure/learn on core improvements
Future Data Spelunking
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52. Questions?
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