How To: Boost Drupal Performance Play Video Movie link (right-click to download)Problem with this video? Contact me It's no coincidence the title of this video corresponds with exactly what you're probably trying to do with your Drupal site. Squeeze every bit of performance you can from whatever server you're on. Shared hosting, dedicated box, virtual server, you name it. It turns out, the tried and true method for the fastest web page response is simply allowing the web server to spit back a simple html page - just like the good old days of Web 1.0. Now, Drupal is a complex Content Management System with years of personal investment by many talented and enterprising minds. But, guess what, as cool and addictive as Drupal is, you still can't beat that simple HTML web page! Boost won't save your bacon if you've got thousands of authenticated users (you need the other solutions above), but for every one of those content-based anonymous-traffic web sites running on Drupal.
APC - Alternative PHP Cache The Alternative PHP Cache (APC) is a free and open opcode cache for PHP. Its goal is to provide a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code. Besides a opcode cache it provides a user cache for storing application data. This module uses the APC user cache as a cache backend for Drupal. Use APC for caches that do not change often and will not grow too big to avoid fragmentation. Drupal 6 The APC backend can be run for drupal 6 using cache backport. Maintainers Drupal 7: R.Muilwijk (sponsored by Trinoco)Drupal 5&6: Slantview Installation instructions
Varnish HTTP Accelerator Integration This module provides integration between your Drupal site and the Varnish HTTP Accelerator, an advanced and very fast reverse-proxy system. Basically, Varnish handles serving static files and anonymous page-views for your site much faster and at higher volumes than Apache, in the neighborhood of 3000 requests per second. This module provides admin-socket integration which allows Drupal to dynamically invalidate cache entries, and also lets you query the Varnish admin interface for status, etc. Compatibility At the moment, using Varnish to any effect at all requires Drupal 7 or PressFlow. We currently support Varnish 2.0, 2.1 and 3. Helpful information for those new to Varnish: Also, this module is beginning to implement dynamic cache expiration via the expire module, which will allow for much longer page lifetimes (and thus higher cache hitrates!). Drupal 7 version A development release for Drupal 7 has just been released. This release needs some love in form of testing and bug reports.
Memcache API and Integration Release Candidate 7.x-1.3-rc1 August 5th, 2014 If you have enabled stampede protection ($conf['memcache_stampede_protection'] = TRUE;), it is strongly recommended that you disable it in production and begin testing this release candidate. Features This module provides integration between Drupal and Memcached with the following features: An API for using Memcached and the PECL Memcache or Memcached libraries with Drupal.Memcache backends for the following systems (all drop-in):Caching (memcache.inc)Sessions (memcache-session.inc)Locking (memcache-lock.inc)A module that provides a comprehensive administrative overview of Drupal's interaction with Memcached and stats.A set of tests that can be run to test your memcache setup. Documentation For requirements, installation requirements, and common troubleshooting issues, see the documentation.
Cache Actions Cache actions provides rules actions for clearing drupal caches. It currently provides actions for: Clearing Drupal cache binsClearing CSS/JS cacheClearing The cache of specific viewsClearing The cache of specific panel pagesClearing The cache of specific mini panels Dependencies Cache actions only depends on the rules module. Compatibility This module is compatible with: Panels 3Views 2 and 3. Version 2 The new version of cache actions offers a lot of new features: Clearing The cache of more than one view at a timeClearing The cache of specific panel page variantsClearing The cache of specific panel page panesClearing The cache of specific mini panel variantsClearing The cache of specific mini panel panesUnit testsClearing the varnish cache with rules, if the varnish module is enabled. Maintainers wanted! I definitely haven't been taking care of this module in the way that it deserves, and I have a new project coming up that will take up most of my time.
XCache