Submitted by patrick on Fri, 03/19/2010 - 18:53
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| Drupal 6 Performance Tips | ||
|---|---|---|
| Author | Trevor James, TJ Holowaychuk |  |
| Publisher | Packt Publishing / Birmingham | |
| First published | February 2010 | |
| Pages | 219 | |
| ISBN | 978-1-847195-84-5 | |
| List price | €30.99 (Ordering / Product information) | |
Drupal is a flexible and versatile Content Management System. It has two major disadvantages, though. The first is being written in PHP, the second is storing content in an SQL database.
PHP is an interpreted, not a compiled language, requiring the scripts to be parsed over and over again, each time a page is requested. SQL is a database concept that adds a considerable amount of overhead to information retrieval.
These two facts make up for a substantial performance hit, even on less trafficked websistes.
In "Drupal 6 Performance Tips", the authors, Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk set out to give practical tips on identifying bottlenecks generally speeding up page generation.
Structure and Content
The book is organized in nine chapters, which loosely build upon each other in the sense that earlier chapters provide introductions to tools and concepts that are later used to actually tweak Drupal performance.
Chapter one describes the upgrade path from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6.x, as the book will not deal with 5.x concepts any more.
Chapter two deals with general administration and maintenance tasks, the reader must be familiar with in order to properly apply the performance tweaks, described in later chapters.
Chapter three introduces the reader to information retrieval. This includes both, reading log entries as well as using the Devel module to gain insight in what's happening behind the scenes. The intent of this chapter is, to teach the reader the tools necessary for finding and identifying bottlenecks.
Chapter four talks about tuning the popular views and panels modules as well as using the core's throttle module to cut back on database queries while under high load.
Chapters five and six are dedicated to the Boost module, which considerably cuts down on page delivery time by caching pages as static HTML files that can be served directly by the webserer without even having to boot Drupal.
Chapter seven and eight are about system level tuning using the Memcache API on WAMP and APC as a caching mechanism.
Chapter nine finally deals with performance issues on multisite installations.
Conclusion
The title "Drupal 6 Performance Tips" promises much. Whether or not the book can live up to this claim is a question of personal skill and knowledge. About the first half of the pages deal more or less only with entry level topics and can be skipped by advanced users. The rest of the book mainly covers various caching techniques that can considerably cut down on database queries and code execution.
There is little doubt that applying "Drupal 6 Performance Tips" to an unoptimized site will result in a major performance boost. It is however rather general and not the magic bullet, holding all the answers to running a high traffic website. Nevertheless, the book is a good resource for Drupal webmasters on an intermediate level.