By tradermike on

I have been running drupal for some time and the growth of users on my site is slowing my site down. I need to find a way to increas the load times and speed up my site. I'm using a virtual private server with my webshot modwest. They also offer a managed dedicated server and I'm wondering if switching to it would help? Do you now? Thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 5.x

Comments

nrixham’s picture

nrixham commented

step 1: check there are no slow queries and optimise (if you are a programmer)
step 2: install a cache
step 3: throw more hardware at the problem

(in short, yes a fast server will speed it up, but there's other things you can do first)

seaneffel’s picture

seaneffel commented

Turn on caching in your Drupal Performance settings at admin > settings > performance. There are two kinds of caching methods to enable that will speed you up a fair amount, page caching and CSS aggregation. You need only check the boxes and test the speed, if that doesn't speed you up enough then look into a third party PHP accelerator.

I've had trouble speeding up sites that use Views very heavily. Views automatically caches it's queries against the database, but it does not cache the results. So if you have a view on your front page that pulls a list of 20 articles, and then some blocks that use views of users and posts and comments, and then a block in your footer that shows recent photo views, you'll have to either rethink your design or use some specially written cache tool to handle your views load times.

tradermike’s picture

tradermike commented

I'm using lots of views on my site so that is probably the chief culprit.

seaneffel’s picture

seaneffel commented

Use the Devel module and turn on the query log. This will put a display at the bottom of all your pages that shows the database query times for each operation the page performs. It will tell you which element of the page is hogging all of your load times, then you can better troubleshoot the problem. http://www.drupal.org/project/devel

Good luck.