High Performance Drupal

Book excerpt: How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis. Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started. Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical