What does it mean when someone says “My Site is slow now”? What is page speed? How do you measure it? How can you make it faster? We’ll try to answer these questions, provide you with a set of tools to use and explain how this relates to your server load. We will cover: - What is page load speed? – Tools used to measure performance of your pages and site – Six Key Improvements to make Drupal “run fast” ++ Performance Module settings and how they work ++ Caching – biggest gainer and how to implement Boost ++ Other quick hits: off loading search, tweaking settings & why running crons is important ++ Ask your host about APC and how to make sure its set up correctly ++ Dare we look at the database? Easy changes that will help a lot! - Monitoring Best practices – what to set up to make sure you know what is going on with your server – What if you get slashdoted? Recommendation on how to quickly take cover from a rhino.

1. Make Drupal Run Fast
increase page load speed
www.prometsource.com

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/joconnell

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About Promet Source
 Build websites – we built using open source tools on LAMP stack,
specializing in Drupal development
 www.prometsource.com
 Drupal Websites for Associations – FREE websites?? Maybe. Ask me.
 www.isupportdigital.com
 Managed hosting in our Chicago Data center
 History
 Founded in 2003
 WHQ in Chicago, but mostly virtual
 Customers

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Who is this guy?

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More about me – my beatifull & supportive wife

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More about me – shichon.blogspot.com

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What is page speed? And what is this presentation
about?
 What is page load speed?
 Tools used to measure performance of your pages and site
 Six Key Improvements to make Drupal "run fast"
 Performance Module settings and how they work
 Caching - biggest gainer and how to implement Boost
 Other quick hits: off loading search, tweaking settings & why running crons
is important
 Ask your host about APC and how to make sure its set up correctly
 Dare we look at the database? Easy changes that will help a lot!

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Other related best practices
Monitoring Best practices - what to set up to
make sure you know what is going on with your
server
What if you get slashdoted? Recommendation
on how to quickly take cover from a rhino.

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Why care about performance?
Google announced earlier this month:
We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed— not only to improve your
ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the
Internet.

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Definitions
 Front End Performance Improvement – “In sampling the top ten U.S.
websites, all but one spend less than 20% of the total response time
getting the HTML document. The other 80+% of the time is spent
dealing with what's in the HTML document, namely, the front-end.
That's why the key to faster web sites is to focus on improving front-end
performance. “**
 Back End Performance Improvement – Server related to increase time
to First Byte
 Performance – How fast does the page load
 Scalability - The ability for a distributed system to easily expand and
contract its resource pool to accommodate heavier or lighter loads.
 High Availablity

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Performance and Scalability
 … and now when im not the only
one?
 How fast do I get my page
Creative Commons Images
http://www.flickr.com/photos/joiseyshowaa/

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Front End vs. Back End
 In sampling the top ten U.S. websites,
all but one spend less than 20% of
the total response time getting the
HTML document. The other 80+% of
the time is spent dealing with what's
in the HTML document, namely, the
front-end. That's why the key to faster
web sites is to focus on improving
front-end performance.

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Waterfall diagrams
 Start - when browser sends request to server
 Connect – when server acknowledges the request
 First Byte – take it takes the server to render the page and send the
first byte of the HTML
 Last Byte – time it takes to transform the data

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Tools
 Yslow for firebug
 http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/
 Page Speed - firebug
 http://code.Google.com/speed/articles/
 Web Page Test
 http://www.webpagetest.org
http://www.flickr.com/photos/bik
 Apache Bench e/
 http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html
 JMeter
 http://jakarta.apache.org/jmeter/
 Devel
 http://drupal.org/project/devel
 Speed Tracer – chrome
 http://code.Google.com/webtoolkit/speedtracer

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Yslow
•Steve Souders, while he
was Chief Performance at
Yahoo! Created YSLOW and
best practices
•Firefox firebug plug in
•Grades your site based on
yahoo best practices
•Scores – higher is better

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Page Speed
Steve Souders is now
at Google 
Google
Recommendations
based on Google best
practices

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Web Page Test (www.webpagetest.org)

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Jmeter – Java based load testing tool

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Apache Bench
Very simple “It is designed
to give you an impression of
how your current Apache
installation performs. This
especially shows you how
many requests per second
your Apache installation is
capable of serving.”
Ab –n # -c # http://[site]/

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Devel – great but check views stats separately

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http://www.flickr.com/people/13809318@N

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Six Key Improvements to make Drupal “run fast”
 On Site, on page changes (use Yslow and Page speed)
 Performance Module settings and how they work
 Caching – biggest gainer and how to implement Boost
 Other quick hits: off loading search, tweaking settings & why running
crons is important
 Ask your host about APC and how to make sure its set up correctly
 Dare we look at the database? Easy changes that will help a lot!
 Performance improvements are implemented at many levels, are iterative
 Change, test, analyze, repeat

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On Site, on page changes (use Yslow and Page speed)
 Make Fewer HTTP requests
 Use a CDN
 Add Expires headers
 Compress components with gzip
deflate
 Put CSS at top
 Put JavaScript at Bottom
 Configure entity tags (ETags)
 Use cookie-free domains

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On Site, on page changes (use Yslow and Page speed) –
Make fewer HTTP requests
Problem: Make fewer HTTP requests
 80% of the end-user response time is spent on the front-end. Most of this
time is tied up in downloading all the components in the page: images,
stylesheets, scripts, Flash, etc. Reducing the number of components in turn
reduces the number of HTTP requests required to render the page. This is
the key to faster pages.
Drupal Solution
 Performance module – turn on Bandwidth optimizations for CSS and
Javascript files
 Manual CSS sprite generator

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On Site, on page changes (use Yslow and Page speed)
- With lots of objects – serve objects from multiple domains
Serve objects from multiple domains
There is trade off between dns look ups and parallel downloads
Browsers do matter (www.browserscope.com)

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On Site, on page changes (use Yslow and Page speed)
- Use a CDN
CDN brings your content closer to the edge of the
network, much faster response and download time
Drupal Modules:
http://drupal.org/project/simplecdn
http://drupal.org/project/cdn by
Wim Leers, needs a cron to run
a fileconveyor
Media Mover

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http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincepal/

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Don’t let your traffic get to the DB – it wants to kill it!
Your Data center

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Performance Module Settings and how they work

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Browser
• Cache
Apache tuning for Drupal
Extend mod_expires setting (make sure its on)
in drupal .htaccess
Compress content before sending it
Apache deflate_module
Solution nginx – gzip module
.htaccess move to httpd.conf eliminates
Apache parse and search on every load

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Reverse Proxy
• Cached
Content
Caching – reverse proxy
Caching - Very high performance gain
Advanced Step: Squid/Varnish (
http://drupal.org/node/91813 )
Very high performance gain
Sidesteps web servers, may be implemented on
separate servers

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Application
Server
• APC
• Memcache
Cache – Cache Router • Boost
• Performance
Module **
Uses fastpath setting, bypassing default cache
use
Enables different caching options
Faster because it by-passes database
Further configuration is necessary

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Application
Server
• APC
• Memcache
Cache – Memcache module • Boost
• Performance
Module **
 Very simple caching mechanism – uses pair values stored in memory
 Very fast
 Using memcache by-passes the database caching
 Is scalable and distrubuted
 May live on other servers

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Application
Server
• APC
• Memcache
Caching using Boost • Boost
• Performance
Module **
Extension of Performance module
Instead of caching results in tables, stores them in files
bypassing PHP and MySQL
Limited to anonymous visitors – so good for slashdot but
not for sites with high number of authenticated visitors
How it works:
Uses apache mod_rewrite directives in .htacess to check if GET
Logged in cookie does not exist
HTML file cached on fiilesystem

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Boost Logic
http://drupal.org/files/images/Boost.preview.png

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Application
Server
• APC
Back End – PHP Accelerator • Memcache
• Boost
• Performance
Module **
 APC is the Alternative PHP
Cache, which is a free, open, and
robust framework for caching and
optimizing PHP intermediate
code.
 APC caching PHP code in a
compiled state
 Needs to be looked at after
installation for proper
configuration, but generally a big
performance boost
 Xcache and eacceletarotor are
other options

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MySQL
• MySQL
caching
MySQL caching
Enable MySQL Query Cache & give it memory
Index Slow queries that run often
Log-slow-queries
Use explain
Index indicies used
Some configuration considerations
InnoDB Buffer Pool ++
Key_buffer is important for temp tables
Core Search Runs Better on MyISAM (but don’t use core
search)

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Back End
 MySQL is core of Drupal
 MySQL tuning is important but may performance gain may not be as
great as that of caching or front end
 Always run and check slow query log often /Prune Drupal cache tables
on busy sites
 Database Performance/MySQL
 Convert Tables to InnoDB
 Row level locking, less problematic on inserts than MyISAM
 Advantages debated, but Drupal 7 install will be on InnoDB

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ww.flickr.com/photos/howar
dlake

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Other quick Hits: off loading search, tweaking settings &
why running crons is important - search
 Search is resource intensive
 Consider moving to Apache Solr
or using Google Search free or
Google Custom Search Engine
 Especially if converting tables to
innoDB

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Drupal settings for performance improvement
 Always run cron
 Set minimum cache lifetime to 0 and increase garbage collector run
frequency for busy sites
 Settings.php:
 Session.gc_maxlifetime
 Session.cache_expire
 Write watchdog entries to syslog instead of db table

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Monitoring Tools – Must have in server tuning
 Trend spotting  You can not fix back end
problems if you do not know what
they are
 Capacity & Load
 Review impact of changes
 Analyze Trends
 Failure & Uptime
 Nagios
 3rd party tools

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What if you get slashdotted?
RUN! PANIC!

45. Questions ?
ANDY@PROMETSOURCE.COM
Blog: www.linuxsysadminblog.com
Site: www.prometsource.com