Posted by Jim S on March 7, 2012 at 4:37pm
I have our church website up and running. It is running in a shared hosting environment. The hosting provider has indicated that the site is using a large amount of memory and I need to optimize the site. I have not done that before and am wondering if anybody knows of a how-to-optimize-your-drupal-site link that can get me jump started.
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More Information
Here are a couple of questions that could help determine if you can run your site on the shared hosting environment.
1. Do you know how much memory you have available? (The PHP Memory Limit can be found on the Reports->Status page in Drupal.)
2. Do you know how much memory is currently being used?
3. How many/What modules are you currently using?
With shared hosting you are often times very limited in the amount of RAM that your site can utilize. Drupal 7 needs a minimum of 32MB for just the core. (http://drupal.org/requirements) Each module can add to that minimum. If you add CCK and Views you are looking at minimum of around 64MB.
Mike Burrows
Owner, Mipaca Interactive, LLC
www.mipaca.com
Is there a way to tell which
Is there a way to tell which modules are using memory? If a module is installed but not neccessarily used, will it still use the memory? I am quite to new to this aspect so I appreciate your inout.
Module Memory Usage
Unfortunately, I don't think there is an easy way to tell how much memory a specific module is using. I am fairly certain that all enabled modules contribute to the memory usage. If you have a module that is enabled but you aren't utilizing it, you should disable it.
Mike Burrows
Owner, Mipaca Interactive, LLC
www.mipaca.com
Optimize a Drupal Site
That certainly was my suspicion as well. So back to the how to optimize a Druapl site, do you hae any ideas on that?
Upgrade The Hosting or Reduce Modules Used
Do you know how much memory you have available in PHP? (The PHP Memory Limit can be found on the Reports->Status page in Drupal admin.)
Without knowing what modules you are specifically using there are 2 ways I can think of to resolve your issue.
Upgrade your hosting. There are several recommended hosts here http://drupal.org/hosting that provide shared hosting and also support the Drupal community. Personally I have used and like HostGator.com. According to their live support you can set a PHP Memory Limit up to 256MB on shared hosting plans.
Reduce Modules Used. Depending on which modules you are utilizing there may be alternative, less memory intensive, modules that allow you to accomplish the same functionality. Again without a list of modules that you are using and seeing the site, I can't recommend more specific things to do.
Mike Burrows
Owner, Mipaca Interactive, LLC
www.mipaca.com
What host are you using?
Ditto for Hostgator...very flexible on what they allow for shared.
Site5 All the way
Site5.com seems to be the best for affordable hosting that i've found for Drupal. They install Drush on all of their servers which makes Drupal maintenance much easier & their support staff is great.
re: Site5 All the way
I use Site5 for all of my hosting. They are GREAT! Customer service is awesome, too.
DreamHost is pretty good (and free for non-profit)
Unlimited hosting/bandwith and free if you can submit your non-profit status to them.
I'm currently hosting our church's website on Wordpress with them, but looking to port it back to Drupal 7.
I have not had any problems with them. I have FTP and SSH access and was able to install Drush myself on their server.
I really think webenabled is
I really think webenabled is good since they are Drupal experts and it is very Drupal friendly. With OpenChurch we are running our low cost VPS on webenabled which is very solid for the money. I think going with a host that actually configures their environments for Drupal is a really big deal.
Follow me on twitter: @drupalninja
Site optimization
Hey Jim,
You might try installing the devel module (not on your production server though) There are some great tools to look at what is being loaded and how much memory is being used. I reduced the load time of one of my sites by following a few of the principles mfer has been speaking about in optimizing your site, just Search Matt Farina Optimization and you should find it. There are some pretty simple things you can do here: http://www.anelloconsulting.com/case_study_increasing_yslow_score_30_poi... as I am currently doing this on a site which fails for etags and expires headers. Images are a big drain and churches love their image galleries ;-) If you post a link I'm sure someone would love to look at it and give you some pointers.
Blessings,
Jon
Lansing Michigan Drupal Web Design and Development