1. Drupal Performance
Tools & Measurement
(Arra'di Nur Rizal)
Joe Chin
SJ
19 February 2013, Singapore

2. Quick Overview
● Drupal as CMS, CMF
● What this meetup is about
○ Bird's eye vs detailed?
○ Best practices
○ Measurement tools
● Open discussion, share & interrupt anytime

3. http://drupalwatchdog.com/1/1/many-layers-caching-drupal

4. Before We Begin...
● Apache bench / Siege / Jmeter
● Yslow & Firebug (FF extension)
● Developer Tools (Chrome extension)
● Pingdom.com
● XHProf / devel module
● New Relic

5. IA / Site Building
● might affect performance, but no studies
● 3rd party webservices
● taxonomy (indexed) vs list fields (text)?
● contrib module selection
○ domain_taxonomy, term_reference_tree
○ how to choose?
● coding best practices in custom modules (use
hook instead of core/contrib hacks, making
use of proper caching: drupal_static, ctools
caching, proper theming)
● target users: anon vs authenticated

6. Easy Peasy Lemon Squeezy!
● optimize / compress files locally (images)
● aggregate CSS & JS
● enable page cache & block cache
● disable unnecessary modules (unused or
heavy UI: views_ui, ds_ui)
● syslog—or no log—instead of dblog
● boost (access to .htaccess, or vhosts file)
● storage_api, CDN

7. Apache Configurations
● Enable mod_expires, mod_deflate
● Move directives from .htaccess to host
configuration and set AllowOverride None
● Set timeout from 300 to 30
● Set StartServers, MinSpareServers,
MaxSpareServers, MaxClients and
MaxRequestsPerChild values
● Disable unused modules ie. mod_cgi,
mod_ldap

8. MySQL Configurations
● Set in my.cnf
○ query_cache_type = 1
○ query_cache_size = 128M
○ query_cache_limit = 2M
● Review with: show status like 'Qcache_%';
○ Qcache_hits - bigger is better
○ Qcache_lowmem_prunes - smaller is better
● Run mysqltuner.pl

9. Additional Services/Modules
● Always use OpCode caching - APC
● Reverse Proxy - Varnish, Squid, Nginx
● Cache storage - Memcache, Redis, Filecache
● NoSQL DB - MongoDB
● Offload searching to Apache Solr
● Substitute Apache for Nginx

10. Real Advance Stuff!
● Separating services
○ web, database, file, search, reverse proxy
● Load balancing
○ Web cluster
○ Database master/slave
● Database sharding

11. Demo 1 - Benchmarking
● Create a worksheet
● Measure baseline
● Single change, measure, repeat

12. Demo 2 - XHProf
● Inclusive - include sub-functions
● Exclusive - exclude sub-functions
● Sort by Exclusive wall time first

13. Additional Resources
● drupal.org
● Drupal 7 books (dev)
http://drupal.org/books?availability%5B%
5D=38414&version%5B%5D=120&version%
5B%5D=20236&audience%5B%5D=1756
● Lullabot / drupalize.me
http://drupalize.me/series/drupal-
performance-scalability-series

14. Q&A
This presentation is collaborative work of:
● Arra'di Nur Rizal
(arra'di.nur.rizal@wunderkraut.com)
● Joe Chin
(joe@techknowjoe.com)
● SJ
(sj@pixelonion.com)