Drupal Performance Quick Reference (part 13)

Time to revisit the different types of Drupal sites to see where gains can be made. What type of site do you have? This quick reference recaps the previous articles and lists the areas where different types of Drupal sites can improve performance.

All Sites

• Get the best server for your budget and requirements.
• Enable CSS and JS optimization in Drupal
• Enable compression in Drupal
• Enable Drupal page cache and consider Boost
• Install APC if available
• Ensure no slow queries from rouge modules
• Tune MySQL for decent query cache and key buffer
• Optimize file size where possible

Server: Low resources

• Boost stops PHP load and Bootstrap
• Sensible module selection
• Avoid node load in views lists
• Smaller JVMs possibly if running Solr
• Nginx smaller than Apache
• mod_fcgid has smaller footprint over mod_php

Server: Farm

• Split off Solr
• Split off DB server, watch the latency
• With Cache Router select Memcache over APC for shared pools
• Master + slaves for DB
• Load balancing across web servers

Size: Many Nodes

• Buy more RAM for database indexes
• Index columns, especially for views
• Thoroughly check slow queries
• Warm up database
• Swap in Solr for search
• Solr to handle taxonomy pages

Activity: Many requests

• Boost or
• Pressflow and Varnish
• Nginx over Apache
• InnoDB on cache tables

Users: Mainly logged in

• View/Block caching
• CacheRouter (APC or Memcache)

Contention: Many Writes

• InnoDB
• Watchdog to file

Content: Heavy

• Optimized files
• Well positioned server
• CDN

Functionality: Rich

• Well behaved modules
• Not too many modules
• View/Block caching

Page browsing: Dispersed

• Boost over Varnish if RAM is tight

Audience: Dispersed

This article forms part of a series on Drupal performance and scalability. The first article in the series is Squeezing the last drop from Drupal: Performance and Scalability.

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