Boost is a Drupal module which provides static page caching for anonymous users. Boost caches a page when a user first visits a page and the the succeeding users are given the cached version of the page. The biggest advantage of Boost is that it works well in shared hosting environments and it provides fresh content for logged in users. Read on to know how to configure Boost in a Drupal 7 website.
Drupal uses a variety of caching systems to improve the site performance. However in certain scenarios they may not be sufficient and more powerful external caching mechanisms are required to improve the performance. One such mechanism is memcached. If you want to know how to install memcached in CentOs then read on to know the steps.
A number of Drupal users were looking to know how to use Boost for authenticated users as Boost only caches pages for anonymous users. If you are a Drupal user and would like to know how to implement Boost for authenticated users then read on to find the solution.
There are a few common performance mistake that are commonly found in most Drupal sites. Here are the list of the Top 10 Performance Mistakes in Drupal that can easily be addressed by a simple change in settings or the addition of a module. The easiest way to solve performance problems in Drupal would be to prevent them in the first place. Contact us for a free consultation on how to build your Drupal website right.
APC or Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. APC allows for caching of opcode generated during PHP script parsing and execution by the Zend engine. If you are using APC 3.1.9 and you are using the default configuration you might run into the error where most PHP requests will return a warning message "PHP Warning: Unknown: Unable to allocate memory for pool. in Unknown on line 0"
One of the Drupal sites we maintain had recently started slowing down considerably in spite of the site mostly being static and in spite of boost set up on the server. On examination of the site we found that two things were happening on the site. One was that the site was being crawled indiscriminately by rogue crawlers. This we solved using the DDOS deflate script and setting DDOS deflate to run every 10 seconds. The second problem was that there were some bots which were continuously sending POST requests to /comment/cid/reply pages. For this we had to come up with a workaround.
If you run a reasonably popular site there is a very good chance that you will get crawled by unscrupulous crawlers once in a while. The regular search crawlers from the popular search engines like the Google bot, Yahoo bot, Bing bot themselves are pretty intensive when they crawl sites but they do have limits on the number of pages crawled per visit and the number of simultaneous connections opened to your server. However there are lots of unscrupulous crawlers like spam bots, email harvesting bots and even some search engines who do not set any reasonable limits on the number of simultaneous connections to your server. There are hardware solutions that are available to prevent this but they may not be affordable for everybody. There is however a simple netstat based solution to prevent DDOS.
Boost is a Drupal module that accelerates the performance of a site by efficient caching of pages. It can be enabled for all pages other than the ones which need to show constantly updating data (for example, a captcha box).
NOTE: If you are looking on how to install and configure Boost for your Drupal website, go here: How to install and configure Boost caching module to speed up performance on your Drupal 6 site.
Here we list some methods for testing the Boost implementation on a Drupal website:
On one of the maintenance projects we got we came across a page that used to take around 11 seconds to load. The page was a views listing for users. We were able to speed up the page load times from around 11 seconds to under 3 seconds by taking out just the distinct option used in the view. The following was the select query that was originally generated from the view with the time logged by views in the preview panel.
Boost is a module that allows for static caching on a Drupal site for improving performance for anonymous users. You can read more about how to install and configure boost here. Boost comes with a boost crawler that can crawl your site and refresh the boost cache. Here is a simple script that can be used to refresh the boost cache without enabling the boost crawler.
Boost is a module in Drupal that enables file based static page caching in Drupal. When an anonymous user visits a page for the first time in a Boost-enabled Drupal site, the page will get stored as a static html file in a cache folder. When the next anonymous user visits the same page the htaccess rules created by Boost will serve the static file cached in the cache folder instead of bootstrapping drupal for generating the page. This saves a lot of processor usage and would help even entry level hosting servers serve reasonably good volume of traffic. Here is how you can install and configure Boost in a Drupal 6 site.
One of the servers we maintain suddenly started developing performance hiccups. The site running on the server was a fully static website configured with static page caching via boost. The site used to receive a reasonably good volume of anonymous and search engine traffic on a daily basis. The only form on the site was a search form which existed as a separate page.
You have your new Drupal site all ready for take off. You just want to make sure you have everything well in place. Here is a little checklist for you to make sure you have the essentials ready. In this part of the checklist series, we look at the important performance related essentials for a Drupal website, so that your site is ready to receive the multitudes it oughta get. These will help you ensure that your site will sail smooth in times of high traffic.
Running Drupal on a shared hosting environment could become a challenge when the site starts getting a lot of visitors. So f you run your Drupal installation on one of the shared hosting providers like GoDaddy, Hostgator, Dreamhost etc and your site is reasonably popular then it is likely that you would have run into performance issues if the site is not configured correctly. If you configure your Drupal site correctly you should be able to stick with shared hosting for a longer period of time before moving on to dedicated hosting.
