Optimizing Drupal to load faster (Server, MySQL, caching, theming, HTML)

Last updated October 25, 2012. Created by serjas on August 10, 2012.
Edited by HongPong, jaisenan. Log in to edit this page.

Basic settings

• Configure cron job (for drupal 6 http://drupal.org/project/poormanscron )
• make sure all cache tables are clearing, properly especially cache_form
• Enable cache options in performance page
• (for Drupal 6, http://drupal.org/project/advagg )

Theme optimization

• Manually Remove blankspaces and comments from .tpl
• No indentation in .tpl
• Turn on CSS and JS aggregation in the performance page
• Manually reduce css file size by removing duplicate and combine similar together
• Move codes to functions which should be in a custom common module. Use functions for similar problems instead of coding separately. Refer core API

Coding standard and proper use of already existing core API

• http://drupal.org/coding-standards

Secure codes

• http://drupal.org/writing-secure-code

DB Query optimization in codes

• Join db queries whenever possible
• For Db update and insert, use core API
• Use drupal standard http://drupal.org/coding-standards

DB table optimization

• http://drupal.org/project/db_maintenance

Disable unnecessary modules

• Devel
• Statistics
• Update status
• Use syslog instead of Database logging

Remove unnecessary contents and others

Cache modules

• Make use of Memcache module to reduce Database overhead (http://drupal.org/project/memcache/ ) Or
• APC (for drupal 7, http://drupal.org/project/apc )
  (for drupal 6, http://drupal.org/project/cacherouter + http://drupal.org/project/boost (optional) )
• http://drupal.org/project/authcache
• Some module may help improve
  http://drupal.org/project/ajaxify_regions (or http://drupal.org/project/ajaxblocks )

Make changes according to Google Pagespeed and yahoo YSlow suggestions

MySQL Settings

• Cache Size say 32MB in MySQL

Apache settings

• DNS lookup : OFF
• set FollowSymLinks everywhere and never set SymLinksIfOwnerMatch
• Avoid content negotiation. Or use type-map files rather than Options MultiViews directive
• KeepAlive on, and KeepAliveTimeout very low (1 or 2 sec)
• Disable or comment access.log settings
• Enable mod_deflate or mod_gzip
• Install APC server with higher memry limit apc.shm_size = 64