Turbo charge your Drupal site performance

Building Bridges, Connecting Communities

JAMES BROBERG (METACDN)TRACK: IMPROVING DRUPAL PERFORMANCE AND THE TEAMS

THAT BUILD DRUPAL SITES

TURBO CHARGE YOUR DRUPAL WEBSITE

It’s a problem because

Abandon rate 40%

Sales 75%

Advertising response Conversions

Search ranking Negative signal

Brand Loyalty

After 3 seconds ...

1. Get your house in order2. Prepare for stormy weather3. Expand your empire

Sanity check your pre-reqs

• Increase PHP memory to sane value

• Install a PHP cache (e.g. APC)

• Stores compiled PHP in-memory

• Turn on MySQL Query Cache

• Make repetition work for you

• Make repetition work for you (HIT!)

Optimise your code

• Be aware of best practice optimizations

• Run your site though Google Page Speed or YSlow to get recommendations

• Some basic hooks in Drupal Core 6/7

• CSS is aggregated + compressed

• JS is aggregated (not compressed)

1. Get your house in order2. Prepare for stormy weather3. Expand your empire

Cache dynamic pages

• Basic Drupal page cache in D7 core

• Boost static page caching in D6/7

• Need Clean URLs enabled first

• Human, cache and SEO friendly!

• Delivers big performance gains for anonymous (not logged in) traffic

Serve static content faster

• Varnish or Nginx reverse proxy can be faster again

• Static files served by reverse proxy

• Dynamic (PHP) served by Apache

• “Snapshots” of dynamic pages can even be cached/served via proxy

1. Get your house in order2. Prepare for stormy weather3. Expand your empire

“Operator, Can you connect me to drupal.org?”

• Most “free” DNS servers from your web host are not very good

• Global “anycast” DNS servers are faster and more reliable

• Affordable offerings from Rackspace and Amazon (no excuses)

• Enterprise offerings from Dyn, UltraDNS

Go global with a CDN

• Site optimizations do not bring your users any closer to your site.

• CDN caches your site pages & content at the edge, closer to customers

• Bulk of content served from CDN

• Drupal CDN module makes integration painless

Booth # 334

Building Bridges, Connecting Communities

Evaluate this session at: portland2013.drupal.org/schedule.

Thank you!

What did you think?