High Performance for Small Sites

Do you administer a small-to-medium traffic site? Is it on shared hosting (e.g., Dreamhost, Stanford AFS)? Would you like to make it faster?

Much of Drupal high performance work focuses on sites like examiner.com that must scale massively to accommodate millions of users, and pursues the "hits-per-second" metric.

However, many Drupal site admins have smaller, low-traffic sites that run on shared hosting, and don't warrant the overhead of a dedicated server, Varnish, Acquia, or Pantheon. These sites run slowly for various reasons, and "seconds-per-hit" is a more meaningful metric.

I will start with a high-level overview of how to assess and prioritize your performance problems, where they're coming from, and why they may (or may not) matter.

I also will walk through debugging a poorly-performing site from the front end to the back end, and discuss performance improvements such as:

• Drupal core performance settings
• CSS and JS aggregation
• Views and Panels caching
• Boost
• Authcache

I'll also cover testing and profiling tools such as devel, ApacheBench, and YSlow, and the built-in tools in browsers like Safari and Chrome.

Slides (upload): 

HighPerformanceforSmallSites.pdf