Performance and Drupal

As we worked towards some exciting performance gains, some of our learning

1. Use Drupal's Page Cache
2. Run Mysql tuner to understand how Mysql responds to your site
3. We never had in our page/panel or block a code rendered directly from a view, all our view results were cached. The lullabot article on caching, The Beginners guide to caching could be a very good starting point.
4. Do not panic by large no of queries, the queries with longer execution time are critical - we focused on the ones on our large tables - NODE, session, user, log, taxonomy tables
5. Queries with inner joins or distinct clause were also marked and reviewed
6. We had large benefits by restricting the log size, periodic clearing of the session tables
7. We did add a patch for Drupal look up path and url redirect, will have that appended to this list.
8. We moved from Drupal search to Google search!
   
9. USE of PHP accelerator is a must

Checkout:

1. Server tuning considerations: http://drupal.org/node/2601
2. http://2bits.com/articles/performance-logging-module-log-performance-statistics-drupal.html
3. http://blamcast.net/articles/speed-up-drupal
4. http://buytaert.net/drupal-performance
   

Checklist for any drupal site LIST 1

While creating the website:

1. List modules used
2. Do not write code in block or page, use custom module
3. Always create code for no script when using java script
4. Use Devel to understand the queries in the website a must especially for home page
5. Check Y slow performance parameters
6. Use captcha
7. SEO

a) Seo site map validate urls (make them meaningful :))
b) Add Google Analytics, to enable tracking
c) meta tag module, to add meaningful meta information
d) xml site map
e) h1 tag
f) introduce image naming convention

Pre Launch:

8. Enable HTML caching for anonymous users
9. Load test the website
10. Check error log in staging

Before Launch:

11. Install PHP accelerator
12. Configure Auto log out and session time
13. Run cron for archives
14. Schedule cron
15. Configure error log not more than a week
16. Schedule back up of database, particularly the log table
17. Admin password protect