Semantic web development and publishing

Tag Archives: drupal

Custom Drupal Distributions (part 10)

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 [...]

Drupal Caching (part 9)

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.

Drupal Troubleshooting (part 8)

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.

Drupal Implementation Decisions (part 7)

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.

Drupal LAMP Server Tuning (part 6)

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 [...]

Drupal Performance Out of the Box (part 5)

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.

Drupal Hosting Environment (part 4)

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 [...]

Drupal and Server Profile (part 3)

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 [...]

Server Tools (part 2)

Before we get into the fun stuff it is important to become familiar with a few basic tools which can help you (i) measure performance and (ii) monitor the system over time.

Squeezing the last drop from Drupal: Performance and Scalability (part 1)

Drupal is a very flexible content management system capable of providing a very wide range of functionality. It’s modular design, whilst flexible, does have the downside of being on the slow side in the performance stakes in certain cases. This guide shows you how to squeeze the last drop of performance out of Drupal by [...]