front end page speed performance improvements for drupal

open source web development


Page Speed

[email protected]

Twitter: @akucharski


@akucharski @dev_machev


About Promet• 2003 Founded• 2008 focus on Drupal CMS• 2009 Mobile development• Faces of Promet today:

open source web developmentAwards and Press

CMS Expo Spotlight Awards

• 2012 Best Drupal CMS App for Commerce

• 2012 Best Drupal Mobile CMS App

Notable Press Mentions

• Wireless Week - Promet iPhone Madison app

• Cult of Mac – ipad Dispatch system

50+ Drupal sponsorships, speakingsessions and attending

open source web developmentOur Solutions

Promet Solutions Inc.

Promet Source

- Open source web development

- Drupal-based websites, products, and applications

Promet Support

- Drupal Managed Services

- Drupal DevOps consulting

Promet Mobile

- Enterprise mobile business solutions

- Drupal integration with mobile


http://www.flickr.com/photos/joconnell

open source web developmentWhat is page speed? And what is

this presentation about?

•What’s speed got to do with it? – Why faster is better

•What is page load speed?•Tools used to measure performance of your pages and site

•Key Improvements to make Drupal "run fast"


Why care about performance?

Google Blog: 2011 – “We encourage you to start looking at your site’s speed— not only to improve your ranking in search engines, but also to improve everyone’s experience on the Internet. “

Why care about page speed?

•Time = Money… •Speed = Money…•Slower Page load = Less Money


HTML DELAY EXPERIMENT

Determine impact of server delays

GOAL

Delay before sending HTML page Different experiments with different

delays Small % of traffic Monitor negative impact

METHODOLOGY

open source web development Lets not get confused

• Performance – How fast does the page load

• Scalability - The ability for a distributed system to easily expand and contract its resource pool to accommodate heavier or lighter loads.

• High Availablity

open source web developmentWaterfall diagrams

• X = Time

• Y = Number of objects on page

• Y(1) = HTTP Request – rest of objects are elements of the page, images, CSS and js files, etc, etc.

• Time to load all elements

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/121022_ND_CF9/1/details/


















































open source web development Waterfall diagrams

• DNS Lookup – time it takes for browser to find the server

• Initial Connection – three way handshake, hard to control

• Time to First Byte – server wait time

• Content Download – how long it takes to transfer the data from server to browser

open source web developmentWaterfall diagrams

• Back End

• Front End

• Render Start

• Render complete




















































Front End vs. Back End

http://www.stevesouders.com/blog/2012/02/10/the-performance-golden-rule/

Front End vs. Back End

open source web developmentTools

• Browser Tools:• Firebug• Yslow for firebug

• http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

• Page Speed – online/Firefox/Chrome• http://code.Google.com/speed/articles/

• Web Page Test• http://www.webpagetest.org

• Apache Bench• http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

• Devel• http://drupal.org/project/devel

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bike/

http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/

http://code.google.com/speed/articles/

http://www.webpagetest.org/

http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/programs/ab.html

http://drupal.org/project/devel

open source web development Firebug


Yslow•Steve Souders, while he was Chief Performance at Yahoo! Created YSLOW and best practices

•Firefox firebug plug in

•Grades your site based on yahoo best practices

•Scores – higher is better


Page Speed

Steve Souders at Google Google Recommendations based on Google best practices


Page Speed

open source web developmentWeb Page Test (www.webpagetest.org)

open source web developmentApache Bench

• Very simple “It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. This especially shows you how many requests per second your Apache installation is capable of serving.”

• Ab –n # -c # http://[site]/

open source web developmentDevel


http://www.flickr.com/people/13809318@N00


The Basics – for designers themers and content editors

Avoid bad requests Avoid CSS expressions Combine images using CSS sprites Minimize DNS lookups Minimize redirects Optimize images Remove unused CSS Serve scaled images Specify image dimensions Use efficient CSS selectors

https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules

open source web developmentKey Improvements to make Drupal

“run fast”

• Low hanging fruit – Turn on performance improvements in Drupal


• Views Cache and Views Content Cache (Alpha)

What about views?

open source web development Drupal.org/projects/speedy

• Speedy - Minfy JavaScript – contributed module

•Minifying the files removes comments, whitespace, and can even transform parts of functions in ways to make them smaller. For example, a minified drupal.js is 24% the size of the original. The minifier used to generate these files is UglifyJS. This is the same one jQuery uses.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a1/Poster_of_Speedy_Delivery.jpg/220px-

Poster_of_Speedy_Delivery.jpg

open source web development Use a CDN

•CDN brings your content closer to the edge of the network, much faster response and download time

•Drupal Modules: •http://drupal.org/project/simplecdn •http://drupal.org/project/cdn byWim Leers, needs a cron to runa fileconveyor

•Media Mover

http://drupal.org/project/simplecdn

http://drupal.org/project/cdn

open source web development Serve objects from multiple domains

• Serve objects from multiple domains

• There is trade off between dns look ups and parallel downloads

• Browsers do matter (www.browserscope.com)

http://www.browserscope.com/


Stay vigilant, check performance continuously and watch out for foreign objects


http://www.flickr.com/photos/vincepal/

open source web developmentDon’t let your traffic get to the DB – it

wants to kill it!

Browser

•Cache

CDN

•Cached static content

Reverse Proxy

•Cached Content

Application Server

•APC•Memcache•Boost•Performance Module **

MySQL

•MySQL caching

Your Data center

open source web developmentPerformance Module Settings and

how they work

open source web developmentApache tuning for Drupal

•Extend mod_expires setting (make sure its on) in drupal .htaccess

•Compress content before sending it•Apache deflate_module•Solution nginx – gzip module

•.htaccess move to httpd.conf eliminates Apache parse and search on every load

Browser

•Cache

open source web developmentCaching – reverse proxy

• Caching - Very high performance gain• Advanced Step: Squid/Varnish (http://drupal.org/node/91813 )

• Very high performance gain• Sidesteps web servers, may be implemented on

separate servers

Reverse Proxy

•Cached Content

http://drupal.org/node/91813

open source web developmentCache – Cache Router

•Uses fastpath setting, bypassing default cache use

•Enables different caching options•Faster because it by-passes database•Further configuration is necessary

Application Server



Cache – Memcache module

• Very simple caching mechanism – uses pair values stored in memory

• Very fast

• Using memcache by-passes the database caching

• Is scalable and distrubuted

• May live on other servers

Memcache Serverer1

Bin:cache

Bin:Cache_block

Bin:Cache_filter

Bin…

Memcache Server2

Bin:cache

Bin:Cache_block

Bin:Cache_filter

Bin…

Memcache Server3

Bin:cache

Bin:Cache_block

Bin:Cache_filter

Bin…

Application Server


open source web developmentCaching using Boost

•Extension of Performance module• Instead of caching results in tables, stores them in files bypassing PHP and MySQL

•Limited to anonymous visitors – so good for slashdot but not for sites with high number of authenticated visitors

•How it works:Uses apache mod_rewrite directives in .htacess to check if GET

Logged in cookie does not existHTML file cached on fiilesystem

Application Server


open source web developmentBoost Logic

http://drupal.org/files/images/Boost.preview.png


Back End – PHP Accelerator

• APC is the Alternative PHP Cache, which is a free, open, and robust framework for caching and optimizing PHP intermediate code.

• APC caching PHP code in a compiled state

• Needs to be looked at after installation for proper configuration, but generally a big performance boost

• Xcache and eacceletarotor are other options

Application Server


open source web developmentMySQL caching

• Enable MySQL Query Cache & give it memory• Index Slow queries that run often

• Log-slow-queries• Use explain• Index indicies used

• Some configuration considerations• InnoDB Buffer Pool ++• Key_buffer is important for temp tables• Core Search Runs Better on MyISAM (but don’t use

core search)

MySQL

•MySQL caching

open source web developmentDrupal settings for performance

improvement

• Always run cron

• Set minimum cache lifetime to 0 and increase garbage collector run frequency for busy sites

• Settings.php:

• Session.gc_maxlifetime

• Session.cache_expire

• Write watchdog entries to syslog instead of db table



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Blog: www.linuxsysadminblog.com

Site: www.prometsource.com

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front end page speed performance improvements for drupal

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