cache

See:

• Boost with nginx and Debian squeeze
• https://github.com/yhager/nginx_drupal

As well as: #244072: Nginx integration

If you like the boost module, please contribute to the community and take a few minutes to help complete this handbook page!

[insert witty and awesome discussion of performance and the importance of websites being fast in all aspects]

Mobile First Means Optimize

[insert thoughts about mobile and link to Drupalcon Denver presentation about this]

Practical Guide for Optimization

Front End Performance

[insert interesting thoughts here]

Back End Performance

[insert interesting thoughts here]

Modules that Enable Performance

[insert interesting thoughts here]

Boost is a contributed module that provides static page caching for Drupal websites. It can help you realize a significant performance increase for personal blogs, small business, corporate sites, portals and directories that receive mostly anonymous traffic. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance and enhancing your website visitor's experience.

For previous versions of Boost, see the Drupal 6.x Boost handbook.

Features

• Improves website performance for anonymous users.
• On-Demand page caching.
• Supports shared, VPS and dedicated hosting.
• Nginix and IIS semi-supported
• Supports Multi-site Installations.
• Supports and designed for Apache.
• Supports HTML, XML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON/AJAX.
• Built-in htaccess file generator if needed.
• Page cache status/flush block. See: #1448476: Admin status block in 7.x-1.x
• Gzip page compression. (partial, see: #1416214: Basic gzip support for 7x)
• Adjustable cache lifetimes.
• Uses cron run to trigger cleaning of cached files.
• Choose which pages are cached.
• Injects HTML comment to provide easy verification of Boost.
• Easy to install and setup.

Introduction

This tutorial is a description of how to setup the mobile version of a Drupal site with theme switching and automatic redirection to the mobile site that works with static page caching mechanisms (Boost module). Redirection is done on Apache's level instead of the PHP level (.htaccess instead of php code).

Basic configuration

Drupal offers basic performance tuning at:
Administration > Configuration > Performance > Development > Performance (admin/config/development/performance)

At this page you can clear the website's cache.

There are options for page and block caching and bandwith optimization through CSS & JavaScript aggregation.

If better optimization is required, you might install one or two performance modules. For example, if the site is on a shared server, try Boost (static page caching for non-logged in visitors), complemented with Authcache -in CR's file or db mode- or Advanced Cache (for logged in members). If on a VPS or dedicated server, there are several suitable options: Boost (for example on a low RAM VPS), Authcache, Cache Router (which includes APC, Memcache...), Varnish, etc. Memcache (or Memcache Storage) and Varnish are also especially suitable when load-balancing multiple servers.

General introduction and tutorials

A good place to start is with Jeff Eaton's tutorial: A Beginner's Guide To Caching Data. It is a nice introduction on why and how to cache data. Or, check the quick example below.

Note the approach presented in the tutorial: the data is first cached statically for reuse within the same request, then cached on the database for reuse across requests.

References

• All the cache API.
• cache_set(): this function is well documented and provides some more, useful documentation.
• cache_get() and cache_clear_all() are two more, useful functions to know and use.

Further information

What value to use for $cid?

The $cid (cache ID) uniquely identify a cached element in a {cache} table.