drupal 7

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socialtalker's picture

i decided to go with drupal 7 instead of pressflow, but i am not at all clear what are the steps to make drupal 7 perform faster. is there some kind of instructions listed anywhere? I know about the boost module, for example. I have heard of stuff like squid and varnish, but do i use that will drupal 7?

Comments

Start by learning about your site

muriqui's picture

I don't think Pressflow vs. Drupal 7 matters so much. The tools you'll use to tune them are basically the same. But you need to characterize your site first before you start optimizing it... Figure out how much traffic you expect to receive, the ratio of anonymous to authenticated users, reads vs. writes, how fast is "fast enough," and so on. Then run load tests based on that information, and see how far you can get with just the features under Drupal's built-in Performance config screen. And if you're using the Views module, play with the caching settings there, too. Boost, Varnish, APC, etc. may help your site, but there's no reason to start bolting on external caching features until you know you're actually having a problem that they're designed to fix.

I've recently setup a Drupal

vegardx's picture

I've recently setup a Drupal 7 site with Varnish (2.1.5), and it works more or less out of the box, you have to make Drupal aware of a reverse proxy in settings.php, but that's pretty straight forward. You also have to examine what modules are setting cookies (some do, and they can be a little pain to find!), but once you've done that you should see a pretty drastic performance increase for unauthenticated users.

Depending on what kind of webpage you're running there are many different approaches, but most general LAMP-stack include some form of opcode caching. You could also play a little with memcached to ease the pain on the SQL-server, but then you're talking about high-traffic site with authenticated users.

Personally I'd stick with Drupal 7 as of now, if there's nothing you need that's currently not stable with Drupal 6. With Varnish properly configured (i only have unauthenticated users) one of my sites easily handle whatever I can throw at it, as long as the pipe is big enough!

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Vegard