Speed!
I have a magazine site at www.sumnercountyparent.com which is a transfer from a turn-key site that I am building to launch at the beginning of next month, and I need to speed this baby up to be ready to support hundreds of users a day, and between 1 and 5 thousand users on the first couple of days when we begin our transfer. At the moment, most pages take from 12 - 30 secs. load time, with admin user generated pages sometimes taking twice as long.
So here's what I got:
Linux Shared Hosting Dedicated server with GoDaddy.
Approx. 12 content types, 13 Ad positions per page (only 3 showing right now), 10 views on the homepage, 7 on any other page, 18 regions, and 46 modules.
I'm trying to alleviate the situation by caching all my blocks (minus the Ad blocks), using CSS Gzip, Javascript Aggregator, fastpath_fscache, and Cache Router as my chief scaling modules. Cache Router is using the default DB caching engine, because I can't seem to get any of the others to work (except for file which doesn't do much).
I'm trying to understand all this SSH and Apache web server configuration stuff, but I'm having a rough time since most walkthroughs don't factor in limited back-end experience. I've never installed PHP or Apache before, never accessed a .conf file, or successfully installed any PHP extensions. All I can do with the server is log in to our database to import, back up, or empty files through myPHPadmin.
I have created a site like this twice before, each with load times in the 6 - 12 second range for most pages, and I think having this knowledge would really help the others and give me some more to work with on future projects.
Your help is MOST appreciated, and I'm sure other Drupal users will appreciate you to if they read this thread.
I forgot. 95% of the site's
I forgot. 95% of the site's content is restricted to authenticated users. This is because we want to encourage subscription to our email newsletter. Feel free to create an account as a first order of business if you happen to check out the site and give any feedback.
Thanks!
Modules
Try disabling any unnecessary modules you have installed, Reduce what gets displayed on the main page (Firebug for Firefox is a great help here), and also give the Boost module a try. This may not solve all of your problems, but should get you going in a better direction.
Boost only works for anonymous users
http://drupal.org/project/boost notes emphatically that it will only improve delivery for anonymous users, as it works by creating static pages and delivering them via URL rewriting.
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Those page load times are terrible, and I'd blame your hosting provider.
We use HotDrupal; cheap, fast and the tech support is first-rate!
Pete.
After weeks of researching
After weeks of researching different ways to speed up my setup, I finally have to chalk it up to the host, since we're using Shared and I really can't ditch any of the modules I have left.
I'll have to convince my boss we get a nice little upgrade.
Thanks for the rec!
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Our site is http://mongolia.charityrallies.org - we're currently running with 233 modules.
Check out the hosting plans at http://www.hotdrupal.com/plans.html
And no, I don't work for them - just a very happy customer; we ran out of space with our disc allocation and Steve Brown (CEO and support supremo) upgraded our hosting package and migrated the whole 6Gb site, databases, mailing lists, email accounts and all to a faster server in 15 minutes, over the phone.
They use very fast disc drives, unlike most shared hosting providers who seem to go for the 'cheap and cheerful' approach to mass storage hardware.
Pete.
Those page load times are
Those page load times are terrible, and I'd blame your hosting provider.
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APC + Tips
If your expecting that kind of load, get a host that provides APC, as that will do wonders. Since your having multiple users consider pressflow & switching your database engine to InnoDB. If the content is the same (user has no preferences, ect...), you might be able to use boost + htaccess password protection as a way to get speed and protect your content.
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eaccelerator works fine for us...
Pete.