The Best of Drupal

Massive web sites with tens of thousands of articles don't tend to run well on Drupal, even with aggressive caching enabled.

Judging from the reading I've been doing on the subject recently, the problem seems to be that Drupal empties its cache when a node is updated. I'm not sure how true that is but, the fact of the matter is, my site (www.freearticles.co.za) was consistently grinding to a hault at peak times and not even aggressive caching was helping.

Now, to save costs, I host the site on a shared host in the US, so setting up a proxy on the server isn't an option to me. In fact, most things people normally suggest (including optimizing the MySQL config) just isn't an option.

So I needed to find a way to improve performance while staying within the limits of the functionality available to me on a shared server.

Enter Boost.

Boost is a Drupal module that creates static HTML versions of pages visited on your site and then serves them up on subsequent requests for the same page.

So, the first time a page is accessed, it's pulled out of the database and there's all sorts of database and PHP overheads on that call. After that, requests to the same page skip PHP and the databaase altogether and serve up plain HTML.

The performance boost is ridiculously impressive. I haven't done any sort of benchmarks as that's really not my thing but I can see and feel the difference and my earnings are steadily increasing.

The module has a problem with the .htaccess file that ships with it but I've solved it for you here.

I still need to do a proper write-up of the fix but if you're reading this, you can probably handle a little techie stuff to get your site going.

Give it a shot and let us know what your results are like!

Posted in

• Performance Modules

• Norio De Sousa's blog