Submitted by Jeff Geerling on November 8, 2011 - 11:48am
This morning, I was presented with quite the conundrum: one of my servers suddently started having about 4x the normal MySQL traffic it would have in a morning, and I had no indication as to why this was happening; traffic to the sites on the server was steady (no spikes), and I couldn't find any problems with any of the sites.
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on March 23, 2010 - 12:07pm
Recently, I was troubleshooting performance issues on a few different websites, and was stymied by the fact that YSlow repeatedly reported an F for "Compress components with gzip," even though online sites like GIDNetwork's Gzip test were reporting successful Gzipping of text components on the site.
Yslow results - not very happy.
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on October 28, 2009 - 3:43am
I've begun working a lot more with Drupal multisites, as doing so saves a lot of time in certain situations (usually, when you have a large group of sites that use the same kinds of Drupal modules, but need to have separate databases and front-end information.
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on September 30, 2009 - 5:58pm
Type here.
# Use mod_deflate to gzip components AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript text/plain text/html text/xml application/xml # Configure ETags properlyHeader unset ETag FileETag None
Type here.
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on August 12, 2009 - 4:26pm
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:
Speed boost due to caching: ~250x faster!
Submitted by Jeff Geerling on August 11, 2009 - 12:45pm
Initially, when thinking about finally taking the plunge and purchasing a slice or two from Slicehost, I thought, "wow, this is going to be incredibly fast and awesome, compared to my Host Gator account!"
But, after setting everything up and putting Open Source Catholic live on the fresh slice, running free -m, and looking at the results, reality set in: 256 MB of RAM is not much to work with if you're running a Drupal site on a LAMP stack! Drupal usually consumes 15-40 MB of RAM per page view for a logged-in user, and if you have a site with 10 or so logged in users at any moment... well, bad things can happen.
For anonymous users, using Boost will help your site fly no matter the amount of RAM you have. But even so, a bunch of requests to uncached pages will cause your site to load a heck of a lot slower, and will fill up your RAM faster than a fire hose fills up an 8 oz. glass!
Using default Apache, MySQL and PHP settings, free -m showed a full 250 MB of RAM used, along with 400-500 swap space used (swap should be kept to a minimum—if you have a lot of swap usage, that means the hard drive is being used instead of RAM, and the hard drive is inherently many times slower!). After performing a few quick modifications to Apache and MySQL, I was able to get this number down to 140 MB RAM / 40-60 MB swap, on average.
I modified the server configuration in two different places: Apache's httpd.conf, and MySQL's my.cnf:
