Front End page speed performance improvements for Drupal

open source web development


Page Speed
andy@promethost.com
Twitter: @akucharski


@akucharski @dev_machev


About Promet
• 2003 Founded
• 2008 focus on Drupal CMS
• 2009 Mobile development
• Faces of Promet today:

Awards and Press

CMS Expo Spotlight Awards
• 2012 Best Drupal CMS App for Commerce
• 2012 Best Drupal Mobile CMS App
Notable Press Mentions
• Wireless Week - Promet iPhone Madison app
• Cult of Mac – ipad Dispatch system
50+ Drupal sponsorships, speaking
sessions and attending

Our Solutions

Promet Solutions Inc.

Promet Source
- Open source web development
- Drupal-based websites, products, and applications

Promet Support
- Drupal Managed Services
- Drupal DevOps consulting

Promet Mobile
- Enterprise mobile business solutions
- Drupal integration with mobile


http://www.flickr.com/photos/joconnell

What is page speed? And what is
this presentation about?

•What’s speed got to do with it? – Why
faster is better
•What is page load speed?
•Tools used to measure performance of
your pages and site
•Key Improvements to make Drupal
"run fast"

Why care about page speed?

•Time = Money…
Why care about performance?

•Speed = Money…
•Slower Page load = Less Money

Google Blog: 2011 – ―We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed—
not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve
everyone’s experience on the Internet. “


HTML DELAY EXPERIMENT
GOAL

Determine impact of server delays
METHODOLOGY

 Delay before sending HTML page
 Different experiments with different delays
 Small % of traffic
 Monitor negative impact

Lets not get confused

• Performance – How fast does the page load
• Scalability - The ability for a distributed system to easily expand and
contract its resource pool to accommodate heavier or lighter loads.
• High Availablity

Waterfall diagrams

• X = Time
• Y = Number of objects on page
• Y(1) = HTTP Request – rest of
objects are elements of the
page, images, CSS and js
files, etc, etc.

• Time to load all elements

open source web development Waterfall diagrams

• DNS Lookup – time it takes for browser to find the server
• Initial Connection – three way handshake, hard to control
• Time to First Byte – server wait time
• Content Download – how long it takes to transfer the data from server
to browser

Waterfall diagrams

• Back End

• Front End

• Render Start

• Render complete

open source web development Front End vs. Back End

Front End vs. Back End

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/

Tools
• Browser Tools:
• Firebug
• Yslow for firebug
• http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
• Page Speed – online/Firefox/Chrome
• http://code.Google.com/speed/articles/
• Web Page Test
• http://www.webpagetest.org
• Apache Bench
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bik
• http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html e/
• Devel
• http://drupal.org/project/devel

open source web development Firebug


Yslow
•Steve Souders, while he
was Chief Performance at
Yahoo! Created YSLOW
and best practices
•Firefox firebug plug in
•Grades your site based on
yahoo best practices
•Scores – higher is better


Page Speed

Steve Souders at Google 
Google Recommendations based on Google best practices


Page Speed

Web Page Test
(www.webpagetest.org)

Apache Bench

• Very simple “It is designed
to give you an impression
of how your current
Apache installation
performs. This especially
shows you how many
requests per second your
Apache installation is
capable of serving.”
• Ab –n # -c # http://[site]/

Devel


http://www.flickr.com/people/13809318@N

The Basics – for designers themers
open source web development and content editors

 Avoid bad requests
 Avoid CSS expressions
 Combine images using CSS sprites
 Minimize DNS lookups
 Minimize redirects
 Optimize images
 Remove unused CSS
 Serve scaled images
 Specify image dimensions
 Use efficient CSS selectors
https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules

Key Improvements to make Drupal
“run fast”
• Low hanging fruit – Turn on performance improvements in Drupal

open source web development What about views?
• Views Cache and Views Content Cache (Alpha)

open source web development Drupal.org/projects/speedy

• Speedy - Minfy JavaScript
– contributed module

•Minifying the files removes
comments, whitespace, and can even
transform parts of functions in ways to
make them smaller. For example, a minified
drupal.js is 24% the size of the original. The
minifier used to generate these files is
UglifyJS. This is the same one jQuery uses.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a1/Poster_of_Speedy_Delivery.jpg/220px-
Poster_of_Speedy_Delivery.jpg

open source web development Use a CDN

• CDN brings your content closer to the edge of the
network, much faster response and download time
• Drupal Modules:
• http://drupal.org/project/simplecdn
• http://drupal.org/project/cdn by
Wim Leers, needs a cron to run
a fileconveyor
• Media Mover

open source web development Serve objects from multiple domains

• Serve objects from multiple domains
• There is trade off between dns look ups and parallel downloads
• Browsers do matter (www.browserscope.com)

Stay vigilant, check performance continuously
open source web development and watch out for foreign objects


http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincepal/

Don’t let your traffic get to the DB – it
wants to kill it!

Your Data center

Browser CDN Reverse Proxy Application MySQL
Server

•Cache •Cached •Cached •APC •MySQL
static Content •Memcache caching
content •Boost
•Performance
Module **

Performance Module Settings and
how they work

Apache tuning for Drupal
Browser

•Cache

•Extend mod_expires setting (make sure its on)
in drupal .htaccess
•Compress content before sending it
• Apache deflate_module
• Solution nginx – gzip module
•.htaccess move to httpd.conf eliminates
Apache parse and search on every load

Caching – reverse proxy
Reverse Proxy

•Cached
Content

• Caching - Very high performance gain
• Advanced Step: Squid/Varnish
(http://drupal.org/node/91813 )
• Very high performance gain
• Sidesteps web servers, may be implemented on
separate servers

Cache – Cache Router
Application
Server

•APC
•Memcache
•Boost
•Performance
Module **

•Uses fastpath setting, bypassing default cache
use
•Enables different caching options
•Faster because it by-passes database
•Further configuration is necessary

Application
Server

•APC
Cache – Memcache module •Memcache
•Boost
•Performance
Module **

• Very simple caching mechanism – uses pair values stored in memory
• Very fast
• Using memcache by-passes the database caching
• Is scalable and distrubuted
• May live on other servers

Memcache Serverer1 Memcache Server2 Memcache Server3
Bin:cache Bin:cache Bin:cache
Bin:Cache_block Bin:Cache_block Bin:Cache_block
Bin:Cache_filter Bin:Cache_filter Bin:Cache_filter
Bin… Bin… Bin…

CachingApplication Boost
using
Server

•APC
•Memcache
•Boost
•Performance
Module **

• Extension of Performance module
• Instead of caching results in tables, stores them in files
bypassing PHP and MySQL
• Limited to anonymous visitors – so good for slashdot
but not for sites with high number of authenticated
visitors
• How it works:
Uses apache mod_rewrite directives in .htacess to check if GET
Logged in cookie does not exist
HTML file cached on fiilesystem

Boost Logic

http://drupal.org/files/images/Boost.preview.png


Application
Server

Back End – PHP Accelerator •APC
•Memcache
•Boost
•Performance
Module **

• APC is the Alternative PHP
Cache, which is a
free, open, and robust
framework for caching and
optimizing PHP intermediate
code.
• APC caching PHP code in a
compiled state
• Needs to be looked at after
installation for proper
configuration, but generally a
big performance boost
• Xcache and eacceletarotor are
other options

MySQL caching
MySQL

•MySQL
caching

• Enable MySQL Query Cache & give it memory
• Index Slow queries that run often
• Log-slow-queries
• Use explain
• Index indicies used
• Some configuration considerations
• InnoDB Buffer Pool ++
• Key_buffer is important for temp tables
• Core Search Runs Better on MyISAM (but don’t use
core search)

Drupal settings for performance
improvement

• Always run cron
• Set minimum cache lifetime to 0 and increase garbage collector run
frequency for busy sites
• Settings.php:
• Session.gc_maxlifetime
• Session.cache_expire
• Write watchdog entries to syslog instead of db table

open source web development Questions ?


ANDY@PROMETSOURCE.COM

Blog: www.linuxsysadminblog.com
Site: www.prometsource.com

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