"Drupal is always so fast!" ... said no one, ever. Drupal has a reputation as being a slow CMS, but that reputation is undeserved; there are many small things that impact a Drupal site's performance in sometimes substantial ways. This session will highlight many 'quick wins' that will get your site performing like a champ in no time! Then we'll take a demonstration site that has many elements of real-world 'slow' Drupal sites, show how to do a quick performance evaluation/triage, and change the site from loading in 4-5 seconds to loading in less than a second, and maxing out at 2 requests per second to a speedy 4,000+ requests per second! The session will also discuss the importance of a plan, benchmarking, and assumptions when you do performance work on your own Drupal site.

1. High Performance Drupal
Jeff Geerling
Technical Architect, Acqia

2. geerlingguy
• Hosted Apache Solr
• Server Check.in
• Ansible for DevOps
• Technical Architect

3. "Drupal is SLOW!"

4. "Drupal is SLOW!"

5. "It's actually hard to intentionally make Drupal slow."
- Me, when creating this presentation

6. Agenda
1. Process for performance improvement
2. Easy Wins for Drupal performance
3. Live site performance improvement demo

7. Process
• Have a plan:
• "Front page should load in < 2 seconds for
anonymous users."
• "Time to first byte should be < 500ms for
anonymous users."

8. Process
• Have a plan:
• "Front page should load in < 2 seconds for
anonymous users."
• "Time to first byte should be < 500ms for
anonymous users."

9. Process
• Run benchmarks:
• TTFB, Full page load, DOM complete, etc.

10. Process
hard
low
high
easy
Performance
Improvement
Difficulty

11. Process
hard
low
high
easy
Performance
Improvement
Difficulty
Good

12. Process
hard
low
high
easy
Performance
Improvement
Difficulty
Good
Bad

13. Process
hard
low
high
easy
Performance
Improvement
Difficulty
Good
Bad
"m
eh"

14. Process
hard
low
high
easy
Performance
Improvement
Difficulty
Good
Bad
"m
eh"
Focus on this area

15. Useful Tools
• Chrome Developer Tools
• Devel, drush
• XHProf (and sometimes XDebug)
• WebPagetest.org
• GTmetrix
• Pingdom Website Speed Test
• ab / wrk / jmeter

16. Focus on ROI
Focus on fixes that produce order-of-magnitude gains first!

17. Easy Wins - Drupal
• General
• KISS: Remove modules, simplify layouts... be ruthless!
• Use Boost (if no Varnish/Nginx static cache)
• Disable dblog module

18. Easy Wins - Drupal
• Caching
• Enable anonymous page cache (default in D8)
• Views: use views caching (+ Views cache bully... but not
needed in D8!), use Litepager
• Use panels, block, entity caching
• Watch for cache-breaking elements (e.g. login block +
Honeypot, etc.)

19. Easy Wins - Drupal
• On the edge of 'easy'
• Use drupal_fast_404() + Fast 404
• Avoid redirects inside Drupal (convenience tradeoff)
• Use drush for cron, use Elysia Cron

20. Easy Wins - Backend
• Apache / Nginx
• "Use PHP-FPM instead of Apache mod_php"
• Not really this simple; more about smart
resource allocation
• More CPU cores, more RAM

21. Easy Wins - Backend
• PHP
• Run version 5.5+
• Make sure OpCache can hold all your code
(opcache_get_status())
• MySQL
• innodb_buffer_size - database in RAM
• slow_query_log - watch it!

22. Easy Wins - Front End
• Optimize images (smaller sizes w/ styles, fewer
images per page, lazy loading)
• Enable CSS/JS Aggregation, consider advagg
• Use CloudFlare or another CDN
• YSlow/PageSpeed - Fix easy configuration
changes (expires, etags, etc.)
• Remove external / social widgets and embeds

23. Easy Wins - Front End
• External service integrations are often the #1
or #2 performance burden for front-end page
load times.
• Social widgets
• Embedded media
• Ads, tracking
• iframe content

24. Let's Do This Thing!
1. Plan
2. Benchmark
3. Adjust
4. Benchmark again

25. 1. Plan
• Home page should load in <1s for anonymous
users over a local network connection
• Home page should load in <2s for authenticated
users over a local network connection
• Assumptions:
• Site has mostly anonymous traffic
• Site serves a single geographical region, mostly
desktop users

26. 1. Plan
• Home page should load in <1s for anonymous
users over a local network connection
• Home page should load in <2s for authenticated
users over a local network connection
• Assumptions:
• Site has mostly anonymous traffic
• Site serves a single geographical region, mostly
desktop users
Important!

27. Demo site: http://hp-drupal.dev/
(running on Drupal VM)

28. 2. Benchmark
Chrome Dev Tools:
• View > Developer >
Developer Tools
• Option + ⌘ + I (Mac)
• Ctrl + Shift + C (Win/Linux)
Network tab
DOMContentLoaded
Load (total time)

29. 2. Benchmark
$ time drush @alias php-eval '
$path="front";
menu_set_active_item($path);
menu_execute_active_handler($path, TRUE);' > /dev/null
$ wrk -t2 -c4 -d30s http://www.example.com/
$ ab -n 50 -c 2 http://www.example.com/
Test PHP/Drupal alone:
Test Backend alone:

30. 2. Benchmark
Benchmark Before After
DOMContentLoaded ~1.6s ?
Load (Full) ~4.0s ?
drush (backend) ~2.0s ?
wrk (load test) ~1.75 req/s ?

31. 3. Adjust
Symptom Indication
Large BE/FE Δ Slow-loading FE resources
Long TTFB* (> 1s) Backend response slow
~2 req/s capacity Site will scale... poorly
*TTFB = Time To First Byte

32. 3. Adjust
• Add Caching
• Beware lipstick on a pig!
• Caches should make what's good, better
• Stop the bleeding first
• Easy Wins, then harder things like slow queries
and code fixes

33. 4. Benchmark again
Benchmark Before After
DOMContentLoaded ~1.6s ~0.2s
Load (Full) ~4.0s ~0.2s
drush (backend) ~2.0s ~0.8s
wrk (load test) ~1.75 req/s ~437 req/s

34. Bonus Round

35. 4. Benchmark again
Benchmark Before After + VARNISH
DOMContentLoaded ~1.6s ~0.1s
Load (Full) ~4.0s ~0.1s
drush (backend) ~2.0s ~
wrk (load test) ~1.75 req/s ~4,000 req/s

36. Other Considerations
• Monitoring:
• Uptime (Pingdom, Server Check.in, etc.)
• Performance (AppNeta, NewRelic)
• Resource usage (Munin, Cacti, Icinga)
• Infrastructure - HA, Scalability
• UX and performance

37. Other Resources
• High Performance Drupal (O'Reilly)
• Drupal VM (optimized LAMP stack)
• Ansible for DevOps (infrastructure focus)