When Memcached Slows Your Drupal Site's Performance

For all of the sites we consult on, and manage, we use the excellent memcache module, which replaces the core's database caching. Database caching works for low traffic simple sites, but cannot scale for heavy traffic or complex site.

Recently we were asked to consult on the slow performance of a site with an all authenticated audience. The site is indeed complex, with over 235 enabled modules, 130 enabled rules, and 110 views.

Presentation: Backdrop: A Drupal Fork

Last week, Nathan Vexler of the University of Waterloo, and Khalid Baheyeldin of 2bits.com presented at the Waterloo Region Drupal Users Group on Backdrop CMS.

Backdrop CMS is a fork of Drupal, based mostly on Drupal 7.x, and mostly compatible with its API. It also has some features from Drupal 8.x. It aims to provide an alternative that reduces the cost of ownership by minimizing the learning curve for developers.

Using Drush for a Seven Day Daily Backup scheme for Drupal sites

Everyone needs to have a backup plan for their live site. Not only can your server's disk get corrupted, but you can also erroneously overwrite your site with bad code or bad data, or your site can get hacked. Detecting the latter situations takes some time. Hours or days.

For this reason, you should have multiple backup copies at multiple time points.

The most convenient scheme is to have a 7 day sliding backup: that is, you have one backup snapshot for each day of the week, with today's backup overwriting the backup from 8 days ago.

Configuring Apache Solr 3.6 for Drupal on Ubuntu 14.04, with password authentication

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In a previous article on Drupal with Apache Solr 4.x, we described one way to install the latest stable Apache Solr 4.x. That article detailed a lot of manual steps involving downloading, extracting, setting permissions, creating a startup script, ...etc.

Configuring Apache Solr 4.x for Drupal, with password authentication

Most of high traffic or complex Drupal sites use Apache Solr as the search engine. It is much faster and more scaleable than Drupal's search module.

In this article, we describe one way of many for having a working Apache Solr installation for use with Drupal 7.x, on Ubunutu Server 12.04 LTS. The technique described should work with Ubunut 14.04 LTS as well.

Another botnet spamming Drupal web sites, causing performance issues

We previously wrote in detail about how botnets hammering a web site can cause outages.

Here is another case that emerged in the past month or so.

Again, it is a distributed attempt from many IP addresses all over the world, most probably from PCs infected with malware.

Their main goal seems to be to add content to a Drupal web site, and trying to register a new user when that attempt is denied because of site permissions.

The pattern is like the following excerpt from the web server's access log.

Abuse Drupal Best Practices at your own peril: Poor Performance

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.

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Is your Drupal or Backdrop CMS site slow?
Is it suffering from server resources shortages?
Is it experiencing outages?
Contact us for Drupal or Backdrop CMS Performance Optimization and Tuning Consulting