Drupal Planet

How to configure Varnish Cache for Drupal with SSL Termination Using Pound or Nginx

Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is the protocol that allows web sites to serve traffic in HTTPS. This provides end to end encryption between the two end points (the browser and the web server). The benefits of using HTTPS is that traffic between the two end points cannot be deciphered by anyone snooping on the connection. This reduces the odds of exposing sensitive information such as passwords, or getting the web site hacked by malicious parties. Google has also indicated that sites serving content exclusively in HTTPS will get a small bump in Page Rank.

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Diagnosing Slow Drupal Operations Using Linux strace

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.

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Slow Queries In Drupal Can Often Be Cured By Indexes

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:

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Installing and Configuring Redis for Drupal 7, and other Memcached Alternatives

For years, we have been using and recommending memcached for Drupal sites as its caching layer, and we wrote several articles on it, for example: configuring Drupal with multiple bins in memcached.

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MongoDB as a caching solution for Drupal 7

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.

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Re-Indexing your content to Solr, the fast way ...

There are rare occasions when you want to re-index all your site's content in Solr. Such occasions include:

  • Major Drupal version upgrade (e.g. from Drupal 6.x to Drupal 7.x).
  • Changing your Solr schema to include more search criteria.
  • Upgrading your Solr server to a new major version.
  • Moving your Solr server from an old server to a new one.

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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.

Backdrop 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.

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High Performance Drupal with Apache MPM Worker Threaded Server and PHP-FPM

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.

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