Presentation from BADCamp 2009 on high performance Drupal: how to make your website fast and scalable.

1. High Performance Drupal
Making Your Site Fast Fast Fast

2. Drupal Is Powerful

3. Drupal is Slow

4. Databases are Slow

5. PHP Is Slow

6. Consumer-Grade Networks Are
Slow

7. Increasing Speed Means Diving
Less Deeply Into The Stack

8. Fast Is Making Fewer Requests
From Faster Sources

9. The Life Of A Pageload
• Browser Request
• Browser Cache?
• Network Request
• Server Response
• Associated Assets (back to top)

10. Optimizing For The Browser
• Make Your HTML/CSS Images Efficient
• Use CSS/JS Aggregation
• Use a CDN
• Yslow is good for profiling this

11. Optimizing Server Response
• Reverse Proxy/Drupal Page Cache
• PHP OpCode Cache
• Drupal System Cache

12. Reverse-Proxies Are Very Fast

13. Faster Than Apache

14. Much Faster Than Drupal

15. Don’t Bother Your Power Tools
With Simple Tasks

16. Implementing Varnish
• Use Pressflow
• Implement A Simple VCL Based On Sessions
• Enable Aggressive Caching
• Enjoy, Experiment, Excel

17. OpCode Caching Keeps Drupal
Loaded In Memory

18. Don’t Touch The Disk

19. Don’t Load Up Apache Threads
With Copies of Drupal

20. 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

21. Drupal Freezes It’s Code Before
Launch

22. Most Real-World Scaling
Information Comes After Release

23. Drupal Supports A Crazy Array Of
Use Cases

24. $5/month Shared Hosting Is Not
High Performance

25. 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

26. Drupal Has A Cache And That Is
Good

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

28. And Serialized.

29. That Works Anywhere, But Is Both
Slow and Expensive

30. 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.

31. 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...

32. 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.

33. Benchmarking/Profiling
• Cachegrind to profile code.
• Jmeter to simulate load.
• Slow Query logs, cactai, etc.

34. 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

36. More Resources
• http://groups.drupal.org/high-performance
• http://pressflow.org
• http://tag1consulting.com
• http://2bits.com
• http://getpantheon.com