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

Running cron manually


Another tip is to run your cron task often in order to clear out your database of stale data including old log entries (saved through the Drupal watchdog module), cache entries that have not been cleared when you cleared your cache tables, and any other stale data. The cron task will also activate other maintenance tasks on your site and force these tasks to run, including re-indexing your site for the Drupal search functionality, force RSS feeds to refresh with new feed content and to update and perform various tasks that are dependent on this utility. For example, if you have the Statistics module enabled, you'll need to run cron in order to index your latest page hits and views. You will also need to run cron in order to activate the Search module indexing of your site's new content.

To run cron you tell Drupal when to execute the cron.php script that sits at the root of your site's directory. cron will then run on a specified timetable—either immediately if you...