High Performance Drupal

Chapter 3. Drupal Performance Out of the Box

Drupal provides several features and configuration options both in the core install and in contributed modules that can affect a site’s performance and scalability. Making use of these can provide dramatic improvements in site performance compared to Drupal’s default settings. While many of these settings are essential when running a large Drupal website in production, they are not enabled by default on new installs and can easily be forgotten when moving a site from development to production. It’s therefore quite common to see newly launched sites with one or more configuration options disabled, leading to performance and scalability issues that could have been avoided with, in many cases, just a few minutes work.

In addition to modules and configuration options that provide quick wins for improving performance, we’ll also discuss some common pitfalls.

Page Caching

The majority of requests served by a Drupal site will either be requests for full HTML pages served to browsers or read-only requests for content in other formats, such as RSS or JSON-LD. Serving a request from Drupal involves the following:

• Parsing the request
• Loading various necessary services and modules
• Locating the correct route controller and executing it
• Rendering in the desired format

The single biggest improvement to application performance that can be made is simply to skip as many of these steps as possible via page caching. When a request comes in, the URL itself ...