High Performance Drupal: Fast and Scalable Designs

How can you help your Drupal website continue to perform at the highest level as it grows to meet demand? This comprehensive guide provides best practices, examples, and in-depth explanations for solving several performance and scalability issues. You’ll learn how to apply coding and infrastructure techniques to Drupal internals, application performance, databases, web servers, and performance analysis.

Covering Drupal versions 7 and 8, this book is the ideal reference for everything from site deployment to implementing specific technologies such as Varnish, memcache, or Solr. If you have a basic understanding of Drupal and the Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) stack, you’re ready to get started.

• Establish a performance baseline and define goals for improvement
• Optimize your website’s code and front-end performance
• Get best and worst practices for customizing Drupal core functionality
• Apply infrastructure design techniques to launch or expand a site
• Use tools to configure, monitor, and optimize MySQL performance
• Employ alternative storage and backend search options as your site grows
• Tune your web servers through httpd and PHP configuration
• Monitor services and perform load tests to catch problems before they become critical

Table of Contents

Chapter 1. Beginning a Performance Project
Chapter 2. Frontend Performance
Chapter 3. Drupal Performance Out of the Box
Chapter 4. Drupal Coding for Optimal Performance
Chapter 5. Drupal Coding for Abysmal Performance
Chapter 6. Verifying Changes
Chapter 7. Infrastructure Design and Planning
Chapter 8. Service Monitoring
Chapter 9. “DevOps”: Breaking Down Barriers Between Development and Operations
Chapter 10. File Storage for Multiple Web Servers
Chapter 11. Drupal and Cloud Deployments
Chapter 12. Failover Configuration
Chapter 13. MySQL
Chapter 14. Tools for Managing and Monitoring MySQL
Chapter 15. MySQL Query Optimization
Chapter 16. Alternative Storage and Cache Backends
Chapter 17. Solr Search
Chapter 18. PHP and httpd Configuration
Chapter 19. Reverse Proxies and Content Delivery Networks
Chapter 20. Load Testing
Chapter 21. Where to Next?