Boost Drupal Performance

By Rumen Yordanov
OpenSource Department Manager at
Propeople
 Facts about me
• Rumen Yordanov
• OpenSource Department Manager at
Propeople
• Working with Drupal since 2007
• PHP and Mysql Certified Engenieer
• Web development since 2000
• Participate and presenting at Drupal Events
 Facts about Propeople
• Danish full service web agency
• 70+ brains
• CPH, Sofia, Chisinau, Sweden, SF, Ukrane
• Drupal, Magento, SiteFinity, EPiServer,
MOSS
• Acquia Enterprise Select & Microsoft Gold
• Berlingske, Amnesty, UNICEF, FDM, Saxo
Bank, Arla Foods, Mærsk, Egmont, SBS
Why is this important?
 What we can do

• Educate on the subject

• Include it in our estimation
• Include it in your business plan
• Optimize your hosting costs
• Plan your success
 Things to consider

• Every system has capacity/limitations

• Improving capacity is ongoing process of

monitoring, optimizing and scaling your setup

• No magic pills but the principals are the same!

 This session
• Understand web sites performance
• Understand Drupal performance
• Make/choose your caching layer
• Optimize LAMP Stack
• Scaling
• Monitoring
• Web browser optimization
• D7 and performance
• Questions
Web workflow
 Optimization process
• Find week spot( bottleneck )
• Determine goals
• Increase capacity( make it run faster)
• Meassure system performance again to
determine new capacity
• Record your results
 Profiling Drupal

• http://mirror.facebook.net/facebook/xhprof
• Inlcuded in latest Devel module
• Not compatible with full page cache( devel
version )
 Profiling Drupal

• Small D6 installation
• Only core modules enabled
• Profile node/1
• Enable some of the most used module
• Profile node/1
Profile Drupal 6
Profile D6
 Profiling Drupal
• Bootstrap process takes more time with
increasing the numbers of installed modules
• Sides effect 404 and ajax callback takes
resources and are and will execute at least for
the time of bootstrapping
• Your custom code will just add time to
bootstrap process
 Choosing cache strategy
• Full page cache – have side effects but is most
effective

• Cache only elements( nodes, views, panels)

Easy to implement but not that effective

• Combination – use both

 Choosing cache strategy
• Things to consider

- When cache is build( on demand or on event )

- Do not add too many cache layers
- Reboot strategy
Full page cache
Profiling
 Full page cache(Authcache)

• Advantages
- really fast
- give you Ajax framework for fast callbacks

• Things to consider
- are your pages cacheable
- side effects
 Invalidating cache

• Drupal says invalidate all

• We need to rewrite cache_clear_all ()
• Add good invalidation strategy
 Invalidating cache
• Rules module
• Add trigger and actions you need
• Some already made actions for you
http://drupal.org/project/cache_actions
 When the cache is not enough

• User specific data ( facebook )

• User often add contents that make the cache
invalid
• Database become bottleneck
 Memcache

• Store data in memory

• Very fast
• Only key, value storage
• Timestamp approach to invalidation
 Offload database

• Memcache
• Search
• Statistics
• Live data
 NoSQL( MongoDB)

• Faster ( no transactions or data integrity)

• Easy to scale
• MongoDB has D7 support
 Patch Drupal
• http://drupal.org/node/557542 -> Cache on
module implements
• http://drupal.org/node/259623 -> Skip apache
folder traverse ( very expensive on high load)
• http://drupal.org/node/106559 ->
drupal_lookup_path() optimization
 Prepare Drupal for scale

• Add ability to use master slave

• Add reverse proxy support
( output correct headers )
• Optimize for innodb
http://fourkitchens.com/pressflow-makes-drupal-
scale
 Prepare Drupal for scale

• Add ability to use master slave

• Add reverse proxy support
( output correct headers )
• Optimize for innodb
http://fourkitchens.com/pressflow-makes-drupal-
scale
 Optimize LAMP Stack

• Accelerate PHP
- APC
- XCache
- HipHop
 Optimize LAMP Stack

• Tune apache configuration

• Add nginx for static content
• Add reverse proxy
• Tune database ( innodb settings )
 Varnish

• Really fast
• Highly flexible configuration
• Lots of tools to debug and profile
• Edge side includes
Varnish
 Varnish
• When to use edge server includes
- when you have different ttl for elements in the
page but the content is shared
• Things to consider
- They will take resources ( make smart
callbacks )
- the end user must wait till all requests are
processed
 Monitoring

• Why is important
• Cacti
• Munin
• Google Analytics
 Stress tests
• Why are they important
- Determine capacity
- Early detect of errors
• Much easier to make today(
http://loadstorm.com )
 Web Browser Optimizations

• Make fewer HTTP requests( Drupal support

aggregation of js and css)
• GZIP the content
• CDN
• Effective browser cache
 D7 Improvements

• Improved cache support for reverse proxy

• Master/Slave replication
• Multiple cache backbends
• NoSQL support
• Better innodb support
Questions

?
 Want to learn more?

Drupal Thursdays
For you that want to learn advanced Drupal from the
developers and themers in Propeople.

Location: Sofia, Pirin 40A street. Second floor

Date: Every Thursday from ~19.30.

More info: http://groups.drupal.org/node/119009

 Need a new job?

We’re hiring 
• Team Lead / Senior PHP developer
• PHP / Drupal developers
• Senior HTML developer

Interested? Talk with Welin or Rumen.