Posted by pedropablo on June 27, 2008 at 12:36am
Hello
I have set up an aggressive static page caching system using Boost module, which I modified to build gzip compressed pages to speed up load times and be able to serve more pages in less time at cuentosparadormir.com. The system works fine with just a few thousand users in a typical shared hosting account, as the content is oriented mainly to anonymous users. Of course javascript and css files are aggregated and compressed (using smartcache module).
Have anyone tried a similar approach? what do you think the limits of such a set up could be, and what should be the next bottleneck I will face for these kind of sites? do you propose any other configuration to create a high performance drupal site in a shared hosting account?
Comments
limit is the host for static files
In this case your visitors see everything without Drupal bootstrapping, so the question is more "what is the limit of a small .htaccess rule and my hosts ability to serve flat files". That limit should be pretty high! I believe this is what makes boost so valuable.
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I though that in first instance...
... but then I realized that if you have lots of small pages that are accessed once or twice a day (which is very typical) , then drupal could be called many more times than I was expecting, and compression could add certain overhead.
At this point, I got lost. Not often accessed pages require more drupal power to build them, and if drupal and php start struggling cpu, what would happen with apache?
boost has helped us a lot
your site is very nicely designed and content presented very well.
i have also tried to use boost module and it works nice (on a dedicated server though)
However, i haven't been able to do the stuff with gzip compression or even smartcache module.
One big issue is with the use of Boost module on drupal in sub directory. (haven't been able to make it work, i am not a programmer, just know a little abt things)
My site still gets overloaded and i am trying to find some good solution.
cache lifetime is critical for boost
Thank you for your comments about my site... :-))
One thing I have found critical when working with boost was cache lifetime. If this lifetime is so short that you don't have enough visitors to take adavantage of static cache for every period (for instance, if you have lot of pages that are accessed just once or twice per cache period), then you can save load with your home and other important pages, but you are overloading the server with those not so famous ones!! As my site was not actually very dynamic, I was able to enhance performance a lot setting boost cache lifetime longer than defaults.
Boost has no rivals if most of your visits access only your more famous pages, but if your traffic pattern involves less visited pages, you will need to tweak boost, and even think about not caching entire subdirectories... Anyway, if boost have not solved your overload problems, I won't advice you to enable gzip compression.
Smartcache module is very, very straigforward to set up. Just follow the readme to modify your .htaccess and the load.php script shipped with the module.
Regarding subdirectories and boost, I have heard problems, but I can't help here: my hosting providers allows me to install drupal easily at the root of every domain or subdomain or addon domain, so I haven't tried it.
Similar Scenario. Limit of shared hosting reached
We have a similar scenario at www.nomaskeine.com
- Shared hosting
- 2000 small different pages
- Pages everyday updated
- similar small traffic in all of this pages
- 8500 visitors/day
- Boost Cache
When we reached 2000 visitors/day the hosting suspended our account (1 warning). MySql Problems.
Then we implemented boost Cache.
Now, when we have reached 9000 visitors/day, the hosting suspended again our account (2 warning) CPU usage Problems.
I have increased the timelife cache from 3 hours to 12. Teh pages are everyday updated.
I think this is the limit of a shared hosting. Now i'm thinking about moving to a dedicated server.
What do yoy think about this scenario?
¿que piensas sobre esto, Pedro Pablo? ¿Alguna sugerencia?
Greetings from Castellón
Kreanto.com, drupal arrived to Spain