Drupal Load Testing
Drupal: Caching and Database Scalability
Note: This is Part 4 of an ongoing series on Drupal performance and load testing. If you haven’t already, read the introduction. Summary We measured Drupal’s performance with respect to database size, demonstrating flat performance regardless of the size of the database. We also got some good data demonstrating Drupal’s behavior with caching. Procedure We re-created our previous test platform: a stock Drupal installation on an Amazon Elastic Cloud m1.large instance with both the Alternative PHP Cache (APC) and Drupal’s built-in caching capabilities. In this test, however, instead of scaling the number of simultaneous users, we instead held the test at 400 … Continue reading »
aiCache and Drupal: A Case Study
Note: This is Part 3 of an ongoing series on Drupal performance and load testing. If you haven’t already, read the introduction. Summary We added to our existing research by configuring a dual-server reverse-proxy system using Drupal and a commercially available product called aiCache. Compared to a single-server installation, aiCache: Improved the number of simultaneous users the site could support by 400%. Greatly improved page durations of cacheable content. Eliminated all errors for users browsing cacheable content (such as anonymous users). Procedure We invited engineers from aiCache and a team of Drupal experts from Achieve Internet, who configured a slightly customized Drupal that could … Continue reading »
Optimizing Drupal: From Baseline Drupal to the Pantheon Drupal Platform
Note: This is Part 2 of an ongoing series on Drupal performance and load testing. If you haven’t already, read the introduction. Summary We measured Drupal’s performance with a naive and recommended configuration, and again using the Pantheon Drupal Platform, demonstrating a better than 15x improvement in performance. Procedure We created a Drupal installation on the Amazon Elastic Cloud, which allows us to start and customize Drupal in a matter of minutes. For these tests we used Amazon’s “Large” 64bit instance, which corresponds roughly to a dual-core machine with 7.5 GB of memory. Our baseline platform consisted of a stock Fedora Core 8 with … Continue reading »
Load Testing Drupal: Introduction
At Web Performance, we’re all about measuring and optimizing web applications. This quarter we decided to test a variety of Drupal configurations, starting with the most basic (unpack the drupal tarball into /var/www and run) and collecting benchmarks with increasingly sophisticated systems using optimized LAMP stacks and even a dual-server caching configuration. For our test scenario, we imagined that we had just started a small drupal-based blog when a popular website linked to one of our stories and directed massive traffic onto our server. These visitors read stories, followed interesting links, and posted comments of their own. … Continue reading »