A recent client performance assessment consulting project showed that on their site, the main page that logged in users would browse is slow. Tuning the server for memory and disk throughput helped somewhat, but did not fully eliminate the issue.
Looking at the page, it was a view, and the total time was around 2.75 seconds.
The main query was not efficient, with lots of left joins, and lots of filtering criteria:
On many occasions, we see web site performance suffereing due to misconfiguration or oversight of system resources. Here is an example where RAM and Disk I/O severely impacted web site performance, and how we fixed them.
A recent project for a client who had bad site performance uncovered issues within the application itself, i.e. how the Drupal site was put together. However, overcoming those issues was not enough to achieve the required scalability with several hundred logged in users on the site at the same time.
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.
The other day, we were helping a long time client with setting up a new development server configured with Ubuntu Server LTS 16.04, which comes with PHP 7.x. Benchmarks of PHP 7.x show that it is faster than any PHP 5.x version by a measurable margin, hence the client's attempt to move to the newer version of Ubuntu and PHP.
But when we tried benchmarking the new server against the existing server, which has Ubuntu Server LTS 14.04, showed that the new server is extremely slow compared to the existing one.
Recently, we were reviewing the performance of a large site that has a significant portion of its traffic from logged in users. The site was suffering from a high load average during peak times.
We enabled slow query logging on the site for a entire week, using the following in my.cnf:
In a previous article from over 5 years ago, we advocated the use of Apache MPM Worker Threaded Server with fcgid over Apache's mod_php.
That was for serveral reasons, including faster handling of static files by Apache threaded server, and lower memory utilization since PHP is not embedded in every Apache process.
However, there were some drawbacks, mainly that APC opcache cache is not shared, and each process has to have its own copy.
We were recently approached by a non-profit site that runs on Drupal.
Their major complaint was that the "content on the site does not show up". The other main complain is that the site is very slow.
In order to troubleshoot the disappearing content, we created a copy of the site in our lab, and proceeded to test it, to see if we can replicate the issues.
On Friday May 2nd, 2014, Khalid of 2bits.com, Inc. presented on Drupal Performance.
The presentation covered important topics such as:
Khalid of 2bits.com Inc. will be presenting Drupal Performance Tips and Tricks at DrupalCamp Toronto 2014 this coming Friday May 2nd at Humber College, Lakeshore Campus.
See you all there ...
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.
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