High Performance DrupalMaking Your Site Fast Fast Fast

Drupal Is Powerful

Drupal is Slow

Databases are Slow

PHP Is Slow

Consumer-Grade Networks Are Slow

Increasing Speed Means Diving Less Deeply Into The Stack

Fast Is Making Fewer Requests From Faster Sources

The Life Of A Pageload

• Browser Request

• Browser Cache?

• Network Request

• Server Response

• Associated Assets (back to top)

Optimizing For The Browser

• Make Your HTML/CSS Images Efficient

• Use CSS/JS Aggregation

• Use a CDN

• Yslow is good for profiling this

Optimizing Server Response

• Reverse Proxy/Drupal Page Cache

• PHP OpCode Cache

• Drupal System Cache

Reverse-Proxies Are Very Fast

Faster Than Apache

Much Faster Than Drupal

Don’t Bother Your Power Tools With Simple Tasks

Implementing Varnish

• Use Pressflow

• Implement A Simple VCL Based On Sessions

• Enable Aggressive Caching

• Enjoy, Experiment, Excel

OpCode Caching Keeps Drupal Loaded In Memory

Don’t Touch The Disk

Don’t Load Up Apache Threads With Copies of Drupal

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

Drupal Freezes It’s Code Before Launch

Most Real-World Scaling Information Comes After Release

Drupal Supports A Crazy Array Of Use Cases

$5/month Shared Hosting Is Not High Performance

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

Drupal Has A Cache And That Is Good

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

And Serialized.

That Works Anywhere, But Is Both Slow and Expensive

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.

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...

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.

Benchmarking/Profiling

• Cachegrind to profile code.

• Jmeter to simulate load.

• Slow Query logs, cactai, etc.

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

More Resources

• http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance

• http://pressflow.org

• http://tag1consulting.com

• http://2bits.com

• http://getpantheon.com