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High Performance Drupal
book

High Performance Drupal

by Jeff Sheltren, Narayan Newton, Nathaniel Catchpole
October 2013
Intermediate to advanced
261 pages
7h 4m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from High Performance Drupal

Chapter 1. Beginning a Performance Project

So you’re ready to jump in and start improving your website’s performance. This can be a daunting task. There are so many services, underlying technologies, and possible problems that it can be difficult to pick a starting point. It is easy to run around in circles, checking and fixing many small issues but never addressing your major problems (or even discovering what they are). Knowing where to start and which issues are of high priority can be one of the most difficult parts of optimizing a site.

Due to these common issues of discovery and prioritization, good performance engineers and system administrators tend to do a lot more gathering of metrics and statistics than most people think. A complete understanding of the problem points of a website (problem pages, blocks, or views) and server metrics during average- and high-load situations is a requirement for making good decisions. Whenever we approach a new infrastructure or website project, the investigation and metrics collection period is often the most important time and will determine how effective the entire optimization project is.

Getting Started with Performance Improvements

We will discuss tools and methodologies for collecting performance information in later chapters. For now, let us assume we have a spreadsheet of problem pages or requests and some server information (CPU, load, I/O usage, etc.) during some peak load periods. The next important step in optimizing a site is ...

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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9781449358013Errata Page