server

I use CentOS, but these guidelines should apply no matter what flavor of linux you use. We all know it's a good security practice to lock down your server and require SSH logins to use an RSA key/pair, rather than a password, right? Plus, it makes it easier for you to login to your server from your primary computers/devices...

I just discovered (after asking about it in the #drupal IRC channel) the wonderful little program ab, included in an Apache installation. This little nugget does one thing, and does it well: It beats the heck out of your server, then tells you how your server did in terms of page serving. I tested a few different configurations on a dedicated, 4-core, 4 GB RAM server from SoftLayer, and used the following two commands:

1. Download the specified URL 1,000 times, with KeepAlive turned off (each request gets a new http connection):

ab -n 1000 -c 5 http://ip.address.of.site/path-to-page.php

2. Downlaod the specified URL 1,000 times, with KeepAlive turned on (thus allowing the connection to be maintained for as many http downloads as you have set in your httpd.conf file):

ab -n 1000 -kc 5 http://ip.address.of.site/path-to-page.php

I ran these tests a few different ways, and here are the results of the tests I ran with KeepAlive on, with the number of pages per second ab reported listed after the method:

• Drupal - normal page caching turned on, css/js aggregation, 55kb page – 12.5 pages/sec
• Joomla - no page caching (disabled due to buggy 1.x caching), 65kb page – 8.2 pages/sec
• Drupal - boost module enabled, serving up the boost-cached file – 3,250 pages/sec
• Joomla - custom page caching system enabled, serving static html file – 2,600 pages/sec

Speed boost due to caching: ~250x faster!

To the uninitiated, Boost is a module for Drupal which has the potential to make your Drupal-based website run many times faster than it's currently running. Boost basically converts pages on a Drupal site into static html files, and allows your website to direct anonymous (non-logged-in) users to the cached html pages.

Doing so speeds your site up quite a bit, because instead of your web server having to run some PHP scripts and connect to your website's database, the server can simply send the complete html file, which requires no extra processor cycles or memory to compile. If your website has a lot of anonymous traffic, the potential speedup is very large. Instead of serving hundreds of users per minute, you could serve thousands.