September 2010 Meeting: Drupal Hosting and System Administration Basics

Wow, I'm really looking forward to this.

We've been struggling with Drupal Performance for a while now and a few weeks back I put together a checklist for Drupal Performance Tips based on reading lots of blog posts here http://2bits.com/ and watching presentations by Khalid from 2bits.

Server Side

* Install APC - Alternative PHP Cache
* Move 301's out of .htaccess or check logfiles against 301's and remove any that haven't shown up; alternatively, consider removing .htaccess altogether
* Consider modifying .htaccess to prevent file-based 404s from requiring Drupal bootstrap [1]
* Turn off PHP error logging to /var/log/*/error.log
* Check Stats for Crawlers and then restrict crawler IP's 

MySQL Side

* Check the Slow Query Log
* Run MySQL Explain on long running queries?
* Make Users and Sessions tables InnoDB (Monitor the locks)? 

Drupal Side

* Install Devel module and get page load and mysql query times
* Implement Fast 404's for images - [2] - Avoids bootstraping Drupal for image 404's
* Install Block timing patch for Devel - [3]
* Check for unnecessary node_load and user_load in views templates and template.php or views pre-processing functions.
* Remove unnecessary modules - Statistics module is heavy as it does a lot of writing.
* In xmlsitemap's setting, change the "Minimum sitemap lifetime" to a higher value. i.e. 3 hours, which should not affect the module's functionality or its submitting of updates to search engines and also disable "Sitemap upon submission" setting also.
* Set Garland for administration theme, including content editing.
* Install block_cache_alter module [4]; alternatively, it may be necessary to set the cache field for a given block to '1' manually in the db.
* If client needs to enter script tags etc use a new Input Format as PHP Input format is not cached. Create a new "Raw" Format, with no line breaks.
* Prevent Ubercart users from logging in
* Consider using Boost for sites with minimal amounts of uncached content 

Devel Settings
Total page time

* Simple sites: 300ms to 500ms
* More complex sites: 600ms to 800ms
* Over 1000 ms is definitely a red flag! 

Number of queries

* 400­-500 should be OK (what they are also)
* Over 500 means the site is complex 

Time for Queries

* Absolute and relative to total page time 

[1] http://wiki.raisedeyebrowclients.com/index.php?title=Htaccess_tweaks
[2] http://2bits.com/drupal-planet/reducing-server-resource-utilization-busy...
[3] http://2bits.com/articles/case-study-views-quicktabs-and-templatephp.html
[4] http://drupal.org/project/block_cache_alter

I would love to hear Ben's presentation.

Sorry guys, I had to be downtown all this afternoon and didn't want to lug around my video equipment around in the rain.

Thanks for the short list Colin.

I am on the hunt for a Canadian hosting service that provides SSH access, 24/7 support, fast page rendering for Drupal, and while it may sound strange - the ability to write temp tables in MySQL (that's what drove me away from my last Canadian based service). I will need a dedicated IP and the ability to conduct secure e-commerce.

My VPS experience has not been good but if this is the option that I need to look at - support will be critical.

Price is not a barrier in this case but if the service has lower priced options that I can offer to clients with more basic needs - this would be in the providers favour.