Our launch team has helped launched tens of thousands of Drupal websites. Each time, we run the same checks. Checks for caching settings. Checks for missing modules. Checks through the watchdog logs. Necessary, but tedious. You’ll learn: - Top 4 reasons why your site could be slow - How to spot the most commonly overlooked culprits and take action to improve your site’s performance - A walk-through of what an underperforming site looks like on the Dashboard, and how to fix it through the Dashboard - Which third-party performance tools to use for popular use-case scenarios To learn more about Launch Check, see https://www.getpantheon.com/product/launchcheck

1. Launch Check Introduction
Best Practices for Successful Launches

2. What we’re covering:
1.
2.
3.
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Top reasons why your site could be slow
Take action to improve your site’s performance
What an underperforming site looks like
Which third-party performance tools to use

3. Launch Check
Performance Recommendations

4. Pantheon Dashboard > Site Environment > Status

5. Best Practices
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No multi-site
sites/all and sites/default exist
No extra files in /sites
Drupal Fast 404 pages on
sites/default/settings.php exists

6. Launch Check: Best practices

7. Drupal’s caching settings
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Anonymous page cache: enabled
Minimum cache lifetime: none
Cached page compression: off
Expiration of cached pages: 15 min+
Aggregate and compress CSS: on
Aggregate JavaScript: on

8. Launch Check: Drupal’s caching settings - before

9. Drupal Cron
● Enabled
● Last run
● Currently running

10. Launch Check: Cron

11. Drupal Database
● collation - UTF8 is best
● storage engine - InnoDB is optimal

12. Launch Check: Drupal’s Database

13. Extensions (modules & themes)
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Count
Duplicates
Not recommended
Development
Missing

14. Launch Check: Extensions - before

15. Drupal’s System Status

16. Users

17. Views

18. Watchdog Database Logs
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PHP messages
Date range
Number of 404 entries
dblog status: enabled
syslog status: not enabled
Count

19. Launch Check: Watchdog

20. Test Configuration
● Simple Drupal 7 site
● Apache Bench - 10,000 requests to home
page (5 concurrent)
● Warmed cache, cleared watchdog
● Comparison
○ Bad config, 1 PHP notice and warning in theme
○ Good config, no PHP notices or warnings

21. Test Result
Bad config, errors
● 20 min, 52 sec
● Requests per
second: 7.98
● Time per request:
626.192 ms
Good config, no errors
● 10 min, 25 sec
● Requests per
second: 15.99
● Time per request:
312.780 ms

22. Why is my site slow?
1. Bad caching configuration
a. Tune!
2. PHP errors
a. Fix them!
3. Wrong database storage engine
a. Convert it!
4. Browser rendering
a. Enable aggregation
b. How to detect slowness?

23. Waterfalling
Rendering Optimizations

24. The Critical Render Path
The critical rendering path is a series of steps that need to take place
in order to render a page in a browser.

25. Waterfall Diagram

26. Resource timing
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Proxy
DNS Lookup
Blocking
Connecting
Sending
Waiting
Receiving

27. Minimizing Round-Trip Times
Reduce the number of serial requests
Before Aggregation of JS/CSS
TTFB
55
Page Size
Complete
Load
DomContentLoad
1.53s
6.7kb
3.68s
3.50
2.8s

28. After Aggregation of JS/CSS
TTFB
35
Page Size
Complete
Load
DomContentLoad
419ms
189kb
2.29s
2.07
1.49s

29. Minimizing Request Overhead
Disable unused modules
TTFB
28
Page Size
Complete
Load
DomContentLoad
400ms
146kb
2.19s
1.8s
1.42s

30. Optimizing Images
PNG
JPG
http://www.smushit.com/ysmush.it/
http://www.punypng.com/
https://tinypng.com/
http://pngcrush.com/
http://pmt.sourceforge.net/pngcrush/
http://jpeg-optimizer.com/
Photoshop
Gimp

32. Best Practices
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Minimize DNS lookups
Minimize redirects
Avoid bad requests
Combine external JavaScript
Combine external CSS
Combine images using CSS sprites
Optimize the order of styles and scripts
Avoid document.write
Avoid CSS @import
Prefer asynchronous resources
Parallelize downloads across hostnames

33. Optimizing Browser Rendering
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Use efficient CSS selectors
Avoid CSS expressions
Put CSS in the document head
Specify image dimensions

34. Where to from here?
Add automation:
● JS Validation
● JS lint
● CSS Validation
● CSS lint
● Grunt pagespeed

35. Front-end tools
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Google Pagespeed
Pingdom
YSlow
Firebug
Webpagetest.org

36. Set Benchmarks
● Prevent against regressions
● Improve user experience
● Visitor retention/acquisition

37. Launch Check
● Launch continuously
● Deploying changes like updating themes
● Catalog result

38. Questions?
http://www.getpantheon.com/product/launchcheck