Book Image

Drupal 6 Performance Tips

By : T J Holowaychuk, Trevor James
Book Image

Drupal 6 Performance Tips

By: T J Holowaychuk, Trevor James

Overview of this book

<p>Drupal is one of the most respected and widely used open source content management frameworks.&nbsp; Small, medium, and large-scale websites are built using Drupal and the framework supports ecommerce, CRM, multisite and web service integrations.&nbsp; <br /><br />Once you get your Drupal site installed and up and running, you will be concerned with site performance and how fast you can make your Drupal site run.&nbsp; This book will focus on implementing performance modules and solutions to help speed up your Drupal website.<br /><br />We will look at introductory topics such as upgrading your Drupal site, maintaining your site, and enabling core Drupal page compression and caching. <br />&nbsp;<br />Then we will turn to an advanced look at some contributed modules that help speed up performance, including Development, Boost, Authcache, Advanced Cache, and the Memcache API and Integration module.<br /><br />Finally, we&rsquo;ll look at how best to implement a Drupal multisite environment and run it with high-speed performance in mind.<br /><br />This book is designed for Drupal developers and webmasters who want to increase their Drupal site&rsquo;s speed and performance.&nbsp; You will take your Drupal site to the next level by not only displaying relevant and newsworthy content, but also running a powerful and high-speed website.</p>
Table of Contents (14 chapters)
Drupal 6 Performance Tips
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewers
Preface

Introduction to Drupal caching


Drupal gives you various methods of caching your site's data and content by using the Drupal core administrative interface. There are a variety of contributed modules that allow for more advanced caching (we'll look at these in later chapters). Drupal allows you to cache data and content in order to speed up the performance of your site in terms of how quickly your pages and entire site loads for the end user.

Caching as much data and content as possible, especially the content that you show to your anonymous site visitors which includes content, blocks, and menus that may not change frequently, will help Drupal to speed up page load times on your site. Drupal will keep the cached data stored in a temp location either on the server or in the MySQL database. The site can easily fetch it for load time from that location.

Drupal does this by storing cached data in specific database tables of your MySQL database, so it can easily retrieve the cached data instead...