Caching

MongoDB is a NoSQL database that has Drupal integration for various scenarios.

One of these scenarios is using MongoDB as the caching layer for Drupal.

This article describes what is needed to get MongoDB working as a caching layer for your Drupal site. We assume that you have an Ubuntu Server LTS 14.04 or similar Debian derived distro.

Download The Drupal Module

First, download the MongoDB Drupal module. You do not need to enable any MongoDB modules.

In the Drupal community, we always recommend using the Drupal API, and best practices for development, management and deployment. This is for many reasons, including modularity, security and maintainability.

But it is also for performance that you need to stick to these guidelines, refined for many years by so many in the community.

When doing performance assessment for large and complex sites to assess why they are not fast or scalable, we often run into cases where modules intentionally disable the Drupal page cache.

Depending on how often it happens and for which pages, disabling the page cache can negatively impact the site's performance, be that in scalability, or speed of serving pages.

How to inspect code for page cache disabling

A client contacted us to assist them in finding a solution for slow page times for their site.

All the pages of the site were slow, and taking 2.9 to 3.3 seconds.

Upon investigation, we found that one view was responsible for most of that time.

However, the query execution itself was fast, around 11 ms.

But, the views rendering time was obscenely high: 2,603.48 ms!

So, when editing the view, you would see this at the bottom:

Query build time        2.07 ms
Query execute time     11.32 ms
View render time    2,603.48 ms