High Performance Drupal
Jeff Sheltren
Narayan Newton
Nathaniel Catchpole
Beijing Cambridge Farnham Kln Sebastopol Tokyo
Praise for High Performance Drupal
Tag1 has been my go-to partner for performance and scalability for the last decade. This book, based on their experience scaling the largest (Drupal) sites on the Internet, is a must-read for any Drupal developer or system administrator.
Michael MeyersVice President, Large Scale Drupal at Acquia
An exhaustive, baremetal-to-browser treatment of both the factors governing Drupal performance, and the tools for working in each layer.
Sam BoyerManager, Enterprise Architecture at NBCUniversal
Its been wonderful to work with the brilliant minds at Tag1 Consulting (Jeff, Narayan, Nat and others) on a number of enterprise-class Drupal projects. Im always blown away by the depth of their knowledge and how theyre able to apply what they know to troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.
This book is a wonderful window into this teams collective experience and skills. Anyone whos serious about Drupal will have this book on their must have list of Drupal references."
Kevin MillecamPartner, WebWise Solutions
Jeff and Narayan have always amazed me with their knowledge and experience with high performance hosting, especially with regards to Drupal. From their experience at the OSU Open Source Lab working on Drupal.org to working at Tag1 they are very much my go to resource for high performance knowledge.
Lance AlbertsonDirector, Oregon State University, Open Source Lab
I first worked with the authors of this book in 2007 to dig Drupal.org out of its downtime woes and, later, on some of Drupals largest commercial projects. Their prolific contributions to infrastructure designs have shaped the industry standard.
Until today, Ive declined to recommend any Drupal performance books that Ive reviewed. Im proud to say this book has changed my mind. Ill be ordering copies for my co-workers and colleagues as soon as its released."
David StraussCTO and Cofounder, Pantheon Systems
Narayan, Nat and Jeff bring together an understanding of Drupal that extends far inside and outside of Drupal. High Performance Drupal provides concrete examples for building highly scalable Drupal websites."
Rudy GrigarSr. Systems Architect, OSU Open Source Lab
Does Drupal scale? This book answers that with a resounding yes!
Dave ODonovanDirector Technology at archetypes.com
Authored by some of the Drupal communitys most knowledgeable experts, High Performance Drupal is bound to become your most valued resource. With this book as a guide, youll be able to create systems and processes that make running your site more efficient and maximize your sites potential.
Holly RossExecutive Director, Drupal Association
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Preface
Drupal has come a long way since becoming an open source project in 2001. What was once a fairly limited content management system has become a very powerful framework that runs millions of websites. Everything from personal blogs and small neighborhood businesses to Internet startups, universities, governments, and global companies are running Drupal. There are hundreds of Drupal-focused companies offering development, hosting, and performance tuning services, and new Drupal sites, small and large, are coming online everyday.
Does Drupal Scale?
The three of us authors all work at Tag1 Consulting, where we focus specifically on the performance and scalability of Drupal websites. If there is one question we see asked more than any other, its, Does Drupal scale? The question may be asked in many different forms: I want to do X (insert super dynamic, cool feature here), and it needs to support millions of users; Were thinking of using Drupal for this project, but we hear that using Views is terribly slow; or focusing on the infrastructure components, Were confident in Drupal, but pretty sure that MySQL cant keep up with our traffic. In the end, it all boils down to, Can Drupal scale? because when we say Drupal in this context, we actually mean the entire stack of infrastructure and software that supports a Drupal site. The short answer is, of course, Yes, but if it were that simple, this book could start and end with this introduction. As you might expect, the actual answer of how to achieve performance while scaling up a large Drupal site is much more complicated.
We deal with clients of all types and with many varying needs. We repeatedly see many of the same issues arise: pages arent caching properly, servers are overloaded, database queries are running too slowly. All of these issues contribute to the overall question of whether and how Drupal can scale. While it would be impossible to cover all the possible reasons for any potential problems in a single book, the best practices and guidance provided here will cover the most common problems encountered while scaling Drupal websites. We provide a strong base of knowledge that can be used to plan for and overcome more difficult or unique performance issues.
Goals of This Book
The primary goal of this book is to help you solve Drupal performance and scalability issues. Drupal makes creating websites incredibly easy; however, if you arent careful, it can quickly turn into a performance nightmare. This book is full of information on best practices for running a high performance Drupal site. This is not just limited to enable these performance settings in the Drupal configuration; rather, we take a holistic approach to website performance, covering Drupal internals, coding, and infrastructure techniques that all come together to build a high-performing and scalable website.
This is a technical book providing in-depth explanations and examples of common methods used to improve Drupal site performance. It is expected that readers of this book have a basic understanding of Drupal and the LAMP stack and are familiar with common hardware and infrastructure concepts. Weve designed this book to be useful to both developers and system administrators. A site cannot perform at a high level unless attention is given to both code and infrastructure.
Supported Drupal Versions
The main focus of the book will be on Drupal versions 7 and 8, with Drupal 8 planned for release shortly after this book goes to press. There are still many websites running Drupal 6, and while our infrastructure advice and examples are still very relevant for older versions of Drupal, be aware that the code examples and discussion of Drupal internals have generally changed for the newer versions of Drupal.
How This Book Is Organized
We cover a wide range of topics within this book and have grouped them into the following topical sections.