This document discusses strategies for improving the performance and scalability of Drupal websites. It recommends analyzing bottlenecks, optimizing web servers, application servers, and databases, adding caching, using reverse proxies, optimizing code, and incrementally adding complexity. Specific optimizations mentioned include cleaning configurations, removing unnecessary modules, adding opcode caching, switching to Nginx/PHP-FPM, using memcache, optimizing queries, profiling code, and caching anonymous traffic. The document emphasizes that code optimization is a major part of performance.

1. Whenever you’re ready...
Performance & Scalability with Drupal
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2. Who the hell is this guy?
• I run Wiredcraft (http://wiredcraft.com)
• We build (serious) Web and mobile solutions
using Open Source technologies
• We work with the United Nations, CNN,
Nvidia...
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3. What’s the deal?
• Drupal is;
• flexible & extensible
• slow as hell
• We want to;
• deliver the content quickly to the user
• optimize the use of backend resources
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4. How do we do that?
• Analyze the bottleneck
• Adapt the back-end and/or front-end
• Test
• Repeat
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5. Now a few advices...
• Add complexity incrementally
• Scale vertically first
• Focus on users not system administrators
• Optimizing your code is a huge part of the
equation
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6. Analyze the bottleneck
• Pimp up your shell skills
• Problem: Network? Disk? CPU? Memory?
• Source: Web server? App server? DB?
• Caching is not magic; it adds complexity
• For the long run, consider monitoring;
Zabbix, Cacti, Nagios, Munin...
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7. Web server
• Clean up your configuration (MPM,
MaxClients, MaxRequestsPerChild,
KeepAlive...)
• Remove unnecessary modules
• Consider switching to NGINX
• Stress test (Apache Benchmark)
• Scale horizontally; load balancer (HAproxy)
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8. App server
• Clean up your configurationand add slow logs if possible
• Remove unnecessary modules
• Consider switching to CGI; PHP-FPM or
FastCGI
• Add an opcode; XCache, eAccelerator or APC
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9. Database server
• Clean up your configuration and add slow logs
• Add caching; Memcache
• Switch from MyISAM to InnoDB
• Scale horizontally; Master/Slave replication
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10. What is Pressflow?
• Patched version of Drupalfor performance purpose
• Runs Drupal.org
• Only works with PHP5 and MySQL
• Supports M/S replication and reverse-proxy
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11. Other optimizations...
• Views caching
• Block caching (Block Cache Alter module)
• Reverse proxy (Varnish) or file caching
(Boost)
• Add a full text search engine; Solr, Sphinx,
Elastic Search... Plenty of modules; Search
API module, Searchlight...
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12. And then some more
• Authenticated caching; much more complex
(AuthCache module)
• More core patches; http://
tag1consulting.com/patches
• Denormalize your tables (Materialized View
API) if you’re on fire
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13. Now the real big thing
• The biggest bottleneck: the code
• Too many modules (feature creep)
• Poor code, slow queries
• “Bad” modules usually results from “bad” engineering
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14. Find out the culprit
• Slow query logs (MySQL)
• Slow script logs (PHP-FPM)
• Code Profiling; XHProf, XDebug
• Testingthe good old “disable and load the page”
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15. Dealing with the situation
• Buy some time:
• Quick wins; Opcode, Memcache
• Switch to NGINX+PHP-FPM
• Cleanup your configuration
• Cache anonymous traffic (Boost or
Varnish)
• Clean up the mess
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16. Next step; front-end
• Complete separate topic;
• CSS/JS aggregation,
• parallelization & CDN,
• Gzip compression,
• sprites & image optimization...
• Code also matters here: optimize!
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17. Questions?
Go easy on me though, I’m sick today...
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