By ophelia on

I need serious Drupal advice. I am running a Drupal 6 site hosted on GoDaddy and it is running like a snail. I am very concerned for my client because they are number one in search results but the pages take a really long time to load. I don't know what to do but I need to do something as soon as possible or I am afraid they will lose users. I installed Boost and that seems to be doing nothing for the page load time. If it keeps getting worse I'm afraid I'll need to scrap this site and write everything from scratch which would be hugely inefficient. I'm an intermediate Drupal user so some of this stuff is over my head. Any advice would be appreciated. Thank you!

Technical stuff:
- Linux / 4GH Web Hosting
- PHP 5.2
- MySQL 5.0

Active modules/components:
- CCK: Content, Content copy, Fieldgroup, Filefield, FileField MP3 Player Formatter, Google Maps Embed, Image FUpload, ImageField, Node Reference, Node Reference URL Widget, Number, Option Widgets, Phone, Text, User Reference, Zipcode
- Caching: Boost
- Date/Time: Calendar, Calendar iCal, Date, Date API, Date Repeat API, Date Timezone, Date Tools
- Filefield Paths
- Image: Image, Image Attach, Image FUpload (image), Image Import
- ImageCache: Image API, Image API GD2, ImageCache, ImageCache UI
- Mail: SimpleNews, SimpleNews on Register
- Media: Embedded Media Field, Embedded Video Field, Media: YouTube, MP3 Player
- Organic Groups: OG, OG Access Control, OG Views Integration
- Other: Automatic Nodetitles, CKEditor, Custom Breadcrumbs, Image FUpload, IMCE, IMCE Kama, Lightbox2, Pathauto, Poormanscron, Token, URLfill
- Registration: Username AJAX check
- Rules: Rules, Rules Administration UI
- Spam control: CAPTCHA, Image CAPTCHA, reCAPTCHA, reCAPTHCA Mailhide, Spamicide
- User interface: Popups API, Popups: Add & Reference
- Views: Views, Views Attach, Views Exporter, Views Gallery, Views Gallery for OG, Views UI
- Voting: Rate, Voting API

Here is the URL: http://www.luberocks.com

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

pixelsweatshop’s picture

pixelsweatshop commented

Your 4GH hosting should scale for the Drupal site, however, you may have a hard limit set on max_mamory in your php.ini file that is keeping from taking advantage of that. Adjust your memory limit and see if that works.

ophelia’s picture

ophelia commented

Thanks, that's helpful. I will look into that!

ophelia’s picture

ophelia commented

I do not see max-memory in my php.ini file. Does that mean there is no memory limit if that is not specified?

pixelsweatshop’s picture

pixelsweatshop commented

Create a file called php.ini in your sites root and place the following into it...

memory_limit = 128M

Then try upping the number and see if it responds.

pwaterz’s picture

pwaterz commented

There tons of things you can do for performance.

1. Do you have at least normal caching turned on?

2. Do you have at least a small amount of caching on all of your views? If not add it.

3. Enable the devel module and enable query logging. This will output a ton of data about all the queries per page. You will find it at the bottom of the page.

4. Enable mysql slow query logs in you my.cf, and look for queries that are taking longer than 1 second.

5. Good mysqltuner and give that a run, it can offer some easy mysql tuning tips

6. Install memcache, can help tons.

7. Install varnish, a bit more tricky to get setup right, but can help a lot.

All in all, not always, but the first place to start looking with a slow site it at mysql, and see if there are some bad queries being ran and try and corrent them. View's doesn't always make the best query. Also make sure you have mysql indexes setup. One module that might help a little bit with that is the dbtuner module.

Hope this helps.

PJW

ophelia’s picture

ophelia commented

Thanks for the suggestions and for the quick response! I will try those and see it if helps. : )

dreadfulcode’s picture

dreadfulcode commented

Any updates on this? Just a little curious since I've been in the same boat before...

One more suggestion: ever tried rackspace hosting? Specifically: rackspace server. It's a little tricky to setup, but I'm amazed at its performance. I did the hostagator shared dealio for a while and it's strong-- but there're much better services out there. PS-- DO NOT EVEN MESS WITH Hostgator VPS with that many mods installed!!!!

Which brings me to my next point: Another reason your site is crawling is because of all those modules installed! I know it's tempting to add those mods to your modules folder, but you get serious performance penalties for doing so. Date and Calendar especially!

My advice for future projects: See what you can do with views and nodereference before going crazy with the other contrib mods. You can do a lot things with just those two modules alone, and find that you could probably get away with half the contribs you have installed on your site.

Good luck!

pwaterz’s picture

pwaterz commented

having a lot of modules can slow you down, but in my opinion not that much. It adds a couple of thousand lines of code and in computer terms, thats nothing. Granted you have to make sure that the modules are well written.

Trying to run Drupal on a cheap VPS usually doesn't work. I recommend a dedicated box. They are pretty cheap these days, sometimes the same price as a VPS. Rackspace is ok, but they are expensive. I have been with fdcservers.net for a long time and think hey have the best prices on bandwidth compared to anyone. I mean they offer unlimited bandwidth for $40 dollars a month.

PJW

charlie-s’s picture

charlie-s commented

A lot of modules can add tens of thousands of lines of code and a LOT of included files on simple page loads. Multiply this by the # of concurrent users and it adds up very quickly.

Disable and uninstall any modules that you aren't really using. Delete immediately any modules that you aren't using but are sitting in your sites/all/modules folder.

You installed boost -- when you compare performance, are you viewing while logged out? There are really no differences?

Try VPS.net's Cloud Hosting plan for $20 a month. They are running on Litespeed and are quite speedy for Drupal installs.

Also, you can install an opcode cacher like APC. If you go to a better host, this will likely already be on the server.

dreadfulcode’s picture

dreadfulcode commented

I can definitely agree that rackspace is expensive, but it's the only solution for running my frankenstein sites, lol. For one project I run an instance that is a dedicated server, 500 MG ram, with Debian OS, APC and Memcached for handling sessions. Cache the views pages, boom, pages load in less than a half second.

I'm only commenting on the amount of modules for this particular project because I'm guilty of binging on them, too.

The only other thing I'll add about using a lot of modules is understanding exactly how they'll affect the site's performance, and whether they play well with other contributed mods, and whether you can serve pages quickly once in production mode.

If your page load times take longer than 2 secs, you are building an enterprise system.

lionheart8’s picture

lionheart8 commented

Hi

I just checked out that url & the sites / pages load fast. [around 9:00 am GMT]
What exactly did you do to achieve this? I would like to assume this is not how it was when you made the support request.

Regards

pwaterz’s picture

pwaterz commented

Yea seems nice and snappy now, Cheers!

PJW

dreadfulcode’s picture

dreadfulcode commented

Yeah, I just checked, too.....

It's probably because Organic Groups was removed..... Another resource hogging module.