High Performance Drupal

Preface

Drupal has come a long way since becoming an open source project in 2001. What was once a fairly limited content management system has become a very powerful framework that runs millions of websites. Everything from personal blogs and small neighborhood businesses to Internet startups, universities, governments, and global companies are running Drupal. There are hundreds of Drupal-focused companies offering development, hosting, and performance tuning services, and new Drupal sites, small and large, are coming online everyday.

Does Drupal Scale?

The three of us authors all work at Tag1 Consulting, where we focus specifically on the performance and scalability of Drupal websites. If there is one question we see asked more than any other, it’s, “Does Drupal scale?” The question may be asked in many different forms: “I want to do X (insert super dynamic, cool feature here), and it needs to support millions of users”; “We’re thinking of using Drupal for this project, but we hear that using Views is terribly slow”; or focusing on the infrastructure components, “We’re confident in Drupal, but pretty sure that MySQL can’t keep up with our traffic.” In the end, it all boils down to, “Can Drupal scale?” because when we say “Drupal” in this context, we actually mean the entire stack of infrastructure and software that supports a Drupal site. The short answer is, of course, “Yes,” but if it were that simple, this book could start and end with this introduction. As you might expect, the ...