Semantic web development and publishing

Category Archives: Tech

Technical articles.

Slow

Drupal Page Rendering (part 12)

February 7, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

The time for a page to render in a user’s browser is comprised of two factors. The first is the time it takes to build a page on the server. The second is the time it takes to send and render the page with all the contained components. This guide has mainly been concerned with [...]

Blue Tape

Drupal Benchmarking (part 11)

February 6, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Benchmarking a system is a reliable way to compare one setup with another and is particularly helpful when comparing different server configurations. We cover a few simple ways to benchmark a Drupal website.

Sharing

Custom Drupal Distributions (part 10)

February 5, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

There are a couple of projects which have made it easy to achieve performance gains by making slight amendments to core or packaging up the code in a helpful manner. Pressflow makes it possible to use a reverse proxy such as Varnish, amongst other things. Mercury packages Pressflow up as a Amazon EC2 image. The [...]

Red Squirrel

Drupal Caching (part 9)

February 4, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Several advanced options exist to take caching to the next level in Drupal. With advanced caching Drupal is able to scale to levels required by the most demanding of sites.

Flat Tire

Drupal Troubleshooting (part 8)

February 3, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Sometimes your installation will be slow for no apparent reason. Time to grab your toolkit and get started on finding and eliminating the problem. Here are some of the common problems faced by developers.

Bail

Drupal Implementation Decisions (part 7)

February 2, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Bad performance can be down to decisions you have made during development because you haven’t been aware of natural limitations of the system or the way Drupal works. The more you poke about the more you will understand. Here’s a grab bag of things which may bite you.

Tune

Drupal LAMP Server Tuning (part 6)

February 1, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Getting the most from your Drupal site means getting the most from your server – optimizing the various layers of the the LAMP stack. This includes the filesystem, database, web server, PHP, RAM and CPU. Tuning the LAMP stack is a major subject requiring a lot of study and practice to become proficient. It’s something [...]

Lunch Box

Drupal Performance Out of the Box (part 5)

January 31, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Drupal has a number of features which allow for performance to be improved without the addition of external modules or for complicated configuration by administrators. A slow system can easily be turned into one which performs well under heavy loads.

Greener Grass

Drupal Hosting Environment (part 4)

January 30, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Sometimes the server environment must be taken as a given and we must work within the bounds of what has been provided. Moving servers can be a time consuming process and not something you wish to do if it can be avoided. It’s best to make the right decisions up front ensuring you have room [...]

The Usual Suspects

Drupal and Server Profile (part 3)

January 29, 2010 in Drupal Planet, Tech by Murray Woodman

Drupal is a very flexible content management system and can solve a wide range of publishing problems. It is capable of handling everything from highly trafficked, often updated, large sites on multiple servers such as drupal.org down to a humble blog. The type of performance issues a site can have will therefore vary depending on [...]