I've implemented a view in Drupal, with 'Ajax' option enabled.
How could I increase the speed of this website ?
it is a bit too slow... is this a normal speed for drupal ? (to open an article, load the content, filter the content...)
Update:
1) Also, saving the view settings from the back-end seems to be very slow
2) Filters (the first 2 are exposed, so they are not applied)
Search: Search Terms required [Exposed]
Taxonomy: Term exposed [Exposed]
Node: Type = Project
3) The links with titles with special fonts are not working (sorry, I haven't fixed this bug yet)
Caching my friend.
Try Boost module, it gives a great "results vs effort" ratio.
If you're still having issues with performance, move on to Varnish.
Your ultimate source for Drupal optimization should be: http://2bits.com
Drupal is taking 9 seconds to answer for me on this page. That is unreasonably slow for Drupal under most circumstances.
Use the devel module to find out if it is the database or something else that is the problem. Enable the Drupal cache, if not already enabled and also enable js/css aggregation.
If only this view is the problem, then the generated query is probably horribly inefficent. You should analyze it and maybe override it with a better query and/or set some appropriate indexes on the involved tables.
If possible, install APC (php opcode cache) on the server, that helps with php speed.
Memcached can help a lot, but installing that is a bit more involved.
As already mentioned Boost gives an extremely high improvement if you have an infrequently updated site. It won't help for registered users, only for anonymous ones.
Related
I am trying to speed up my wordpress site. In this case, it is powered by Visual Composer. We have attempted to speed up the site using smaller images, static text, and CDN-movement of movies.
However, I am being told by a service that Visual Composer is the main culprit on why the website is extremely slow. I have no idea how to begin troubleshooting this, and I am asking this group if anyone has had this told to them and what they did about it.
My Site is https://www.trekfederation.com/
Anything to start with would be greatly appreciated.
You shouldn't use Visual Composer. Have a theme custom made so you don't have extra bloat in your site. Visual Composer creates plugin madness and bloats your database. Its not a quick process but making a brand new theme or starting with one of WordPress's themes and making it your own is your best bet. You could also hire someone to do it.
I too was curious about the same question and could not find a reasonably satisfactory answer to my question and so I decided to test the results with and without VC using https://gtmetrix.com/
Following are the results:
Speed before creating the page; using Visual Composer:
Speed of page; when created with Visual Composer:
There is a drastic fall in the speed; having said that; if you tend to use Visual composer some of the premium themes; which have been optimized for VC, you will not face such issues. Wowmall is one such theme on themeforest; which has a decent speed. They do use VC and also provide it free with the purchase of their theme.
Here is the checklist I follow to make sure my WordPress sites do not slow down.
Test the themes well before implementing them on the live project (generally use https://gtmetrix.com/ https://tools.pingdom.com/ https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
Use Max CDN for content delivery network https://www.maxcdn.com/
Use w3 total cache plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/ (I stick to free version; unless I expect high traffic on the website)
Use a minimum number of plugins; it's very tempting to use some plugin to get things done quickly however it may backfire in terms of speed.
PS: you can consider https://wpengine.com/ for hosting solution; I have not personally used their services, however, know that they take care of caching needs quite effectively.
EDIT:
I have also observed the Revolution slider script slow down the website, whether or not the slider is used on the page; the js runs once the plugin is activated.
To conclude Wordpress is a double-edged sword; if not wisely used will result in a poor web performance.
Okay, so this turned out to be fairly curious - I was able to figure out what the developer has done to trick Google Page Speed (and me).
I have attached a screenshot.
He checked for user-agent-string for Google Page Speeds Lighthouse and then shows it a screenshot of a website instead of the website itself. He even shows separate screenshots for mobile and desktop and has added some CSS animations to make the loading seem more realistic.
I know next to nothing about Drupal but I do have a question. We had a site, written in straight HTML and PHP, that loaded the main page in 1-2 seconds and made 25 requests to the server to get the data it needed. A new Drupal version of the site takes 5-6 seconds to load the main page, which is no more complicated than the old page, and makes 127 requests (I'm watching Firebug NET) to the server to get the data it needs.
Is this typical?
Thanks.
Yep a 3x performance hit is natural to Drupal, or most of large scale PHP application framework. Bootstraping Drupal is a costly operation as it requires loading a lot of files. Drupal is also known to perform too much DB queries in order to produce a single page.
The first step is to enable page caching and JS/CSS aggregation. This can be done from the administration page at Administration >> Configuration >> Performance (in Drupal 7).
But a 1-2 seconds load time on a lightweight PHP site is a sign of a either overloaded or badly tuned hosting. You should ensure you site is running in a recent PHP version (PHP is getting faster and faster with each version). Also enable APC (or any other opcache), even with the default settings it can greatly improve Drupal's performances. With APC, try increasing the shared memory size (eg. apc.shm_size = 64 in php.ini).
You should also try profiling your site to identify the actual bottle necks. With Drupal making several requests per page, the DB quickly becomes the bottle neck. Drupal support using multiple slave servers for read queries.
About the database, Drupal uses an internal cache which by default is stored in the database. So this cache does not deal well with overloaded database. Drupal's cache is pluggable. It can be configured to use memcache, redis or mongodb for its storage. This could greatly reduce the load on the database.
Yes drupal is slow.
Thats why we use caching mecahnisms if ur page is making too many requests
See if u can aggregate ur CSS and JS(This will reduce number of
HTML calls. u can do this from admin)
Use CDN
use memcache or varnish cache
use page cache in apache.
Note:-please provide some actual data split up with some load testing tools
How much requests are sent to server? it also matters but drupal has solutions for it. Drupal combine all css files in to a single file to make server calls low, and similarly for js files.
But the speed also matters on server side code, database operations. Drupal is a powerful system which makes complex things easy (and yes easy things complex) and provides such capabilities so that a user can make a complete portal without a line of coding. But all these features come by the cost of performance. Internally drupal do lots of operations and it makes it slow.
Those operations includes views and block operations and the more complex the view / block / form is, the more operations there will be, and hence it will take more time.
Also if the site contents are increased then it will be become more slow. Because drupal consider every content as a node, and for all of your content types (for example news, cms pages, testimonials and so on) data is stored in a single node table (some other tables are also used, but your main contents are stored in node table). So when the contents are increased, the load on that single table is increased, which cause slow database operations, because the more big your table size is, the more operation time it will be taking.
I may be wrong, but Drupal is slow :P
I need to develop a newspaper site in Drupal, I've already played around with Drupal a little, and I think I know which modules would best suit my purposes. Naturally, one of the modules I'll be needing to use most is Views, but I have a couple of questions:
Because this is a content-intensive site, I was wondering if using 5-6 views on each page to generate node teaser + thumbnail lists would impact performance adversely?
I am a designer with significant front-end development experience. Like I said I've played around with Drupal quite a bit and other than running into a few hurdles which I eventually overcame, for the most part I was able to get it to do what I needed it to. Having said that, does one also need strong programming skills to fully develop a site in Drupal?
Thank you very much for your help!
Jane
Views offers caching and Drupal also has block caching, which should help you improve performance. The SQL that Views generates is never as good as handwritten SQL, but if you make simple Views, the SQL is actually quite good and not a performance problem (unless you have millions of page views).
If you can create the features you need, with modules from Drupal.org, you don't need strong developer skills. But you do need to know some PHP to make a Drupal theme which is what controls the layout of the site. It will also be a great help, in understanding the Drupal theming system, but not a requirement.
First off, check out openpublishapp.com for a Drupal distro that is made for publishers from the ground up, it's pretty hot.
To answer your questions:
1) As far as performance and views goes, having 5-6 views on a page is a normal requirement for a drupal news site and the performance issues are usually handled by views/panel cache, and using a page cache like Varnish in front of a web server, Object caches like Memcached (for the DB) and opcode caches like APC...if you don't want to learn all that off the bat you should still be fine if your traffic isn't too intense (but go sign up at getpantheon.com for awesome hosting with all of that and the kitchen sink, and check out groups.drupal.org/pantheon)
2) If the functionality exists by way of core/contrib modules, to fully develop a site for the most part one only needs to understand enough PHP to theme, and often with starter themes like Fusion, and some of the others you hardly even need that, just an understanding of how they work and are extended (which is well documented). That said, if you want functionality that doesn't exist, you'll have to code it, or have someone code it for which strong programming skills are desired, but not necessarily required :)
Even I recommend the use of the OPENPUBLISH - https://www.acquia.com/solutions/publishing
On top of to this you can make an efficient usage of
1. APC - PHP byte-code caching
2. Drupal Caching - block/template/view level caching
3. Boost - Caching module which doesn’t need any external tools
4. Varnish - HTTP accelerator
5. Memcache - Data intensive content.
Apart from this you will also need to think effectively on deciding on DEPLOYMENT ARCHITECTURE of the site - preferably Acquia or Amazon environment.
Learning curve may vary depending on your current skills in PHP or Drupal. Usage of already established distribution like OPENPUBLISH may help you to minimize the dependability on too much custom coding.
I'm working at a company that uses Drupal 6 to host documentation for it's SAAS products. The documentation is organized in various books using Book.module.
We have a Production Drupal site with the documentation for the production SAAS product.
Secondly, we have a "Preview" site, for the upcoming version of our product - the documentation is slightly different than on the Production site.
Thirdly, we have a "Development" site, which contains the unstable version of our product documentation. The documentation here changes frequently
Documents are originally authored on Development, moved to Preview, and then finally to Production.
It's quite unwieldy to manually update each Drupal site as our product evolves. I've looked at Deploy.module, and although it looks promising, it has limitations wrt books (ie: it can't handle the book structure/menus). It also makes for a solution that is quite complex with lots or moving parts.
I'm hoping that I've been over-thinking everything and some Drupal rockstar out there can point out an obvious (or not-so-obvious) solution.
(An obvious non-drupal solution would probably just be store the documentation pages as html in version control and update each site with the appropriate revision. But with this I lose the ACL functionality that Drupal is so good at.)
Thoughts?
Cheers
I've had good luck with the Feeds module to get one site to consume a certain view from another site when I choose or periodically. It will take some configuration work to get going but it's more flexible than a turn-key solution and it's less fragile than any SQL dump -> import of the node revisions table.
We want to build a web application, that is specific to our domain, but also includes forums, blogs, etc in this application. Some integration points to Twitter and Facebook are also required.
There will also be a desktop application that connects to our web application for uploading data and downloading configuration and reports.
The question is, can we extend Drupal to host both the regular modules and our web application? (There will be business entities and their properties and daily data uploaded from the desktop application)
Or can Drupal be integrated with external applications? As an example, users and roles need to be the same and consistent across both. We may also want data from the web application searchable in Drupal.
I know this is a bit vague, but I cannot reveal more. I am very new to content management and I just wanted to know if someone has built this kind of application.
I try to rephrase what you wrote, just for you to check that I got your question right. You basically need to create a web application that:
Implements some of the standard functionality of Drupal
Have some custom functionality that should "blend into" the Drupal one (same users, same permissions, etc...)
Be able to upload/download content (or data) from desktop applications.
If I got you right, the short answer is: yes, you can do that with Drupal.
Now for the extensive one:
- Drupal has literally thousands of modules, so I expect you to get most of the things you want by simply installing the right combination of readily available modules.
- Of course, any custom functionality can easily be implemented in form of a module too (quite standard thing these days).
- The interaction with a desktop application is normally implemented via webservices rather than querying the DB directly. Drupal comes natively with a xmlrpc server and client, but you can scale up to SOAP - if you wish - via a couple of contrib modules.
Some additional thoughts:
If you choose to use Drupal, and you start from scratch, then you have to be aware you and your team will need to dedicate some time and effort to understand how Drupal works. Although - differently than Palantir - I stuck with Drupal, I agree with her/him on the fact that Drupal gets complicated complex right off the bat. This is the trade-off you have to pay in order to have a platform that - rest assured - is very flexible, extremely pluggable and rock-solid (otherwise it wouldn't have been used to redesign the whitehouse, nor Drupal would have got for the second year in a row the "best PHP CMS" award, I suppose).
The good news is: there are some excellent books out there, and I would certainly recommend "Pro Drupal Development" for an in-depth and all-around explanation of the system. Just be sure to get the 2nd edition, as the first deals with the now obsolete 5 seres. That said...
A very good thing about Drupal, at least in my opinion, is that most of the tweaks you might need to do to an existing functionality can be implemented by hooking into the original code from a custom module too. This IMO is the biggest advantage of Drupal: you never have to touch other developers' code to achieve your goals, and this means - for example - that you will be able to keep your core and contrib modules up-to-date without breaking any customisation you might have done.
Drupal is heavy. Compared to other CMS it sucks plenty of processing power and RAM from your server, and - unless you are going to have a very small site - I recommend to deploy it in conjunction with nginx, rather than Apache.
Drupal scales well, thanks to a good mechanism of caching and "throttling up" mechanisms. Strange as it might sound, Drupal scales very well on large traffic websites, so that big increases in traffic do not necessarily imply big increases in resource usage.
The user experience out-of-the-box on a Drupal site is quite poor. There is a massive work being done on this at the moment (here and here (video)), but improvements won't be available until D7 is released [soon, but then you will have to wait for the modules to be ported], so it is advisable to allocate some time to create an administrative theme, if the admins of your website won't be of the technical type.
At the end of the day, my advice is: if your site is going to go big / complex / with complicated business logic and lots of functionality, then Drupal is probably a good candidate. If your site is contrarily a small-scale one with standard functionality plus a few custom bits, maybe Wordpress / Joomla could fit your needs better [not because they are 'less powerful' but because Drupal strengths would be unused in this case, while Wordpress/Joomla simpler architecture would probably represent an advantage in this scenario]
Other options would certainly be frameworks like CakePHP or Django, for example, but that - IMO - is a totally different approach to the matter, I would say.
Short answer: Drupal is well suited to build something like that, especially if you are willing to integrate your app/logic into Drupal as a suite of custom modules. The other way, integrating Drupal into an external application, can also be done, but will give you more friction, as Drupals architecture is pretty much geared towards being a framework in its own right.
Longer answer: I have a pretty much opposite opinion/experience compared to Palantirs. I've been working almost exclusively with Drupal for a year now, in the context of two fairly complex/'enterprisy' projects (after several years of 'on the side' usage for smaller things). While I agree that it imposes some rigid rules (but not limits!), I consider this to be an advantage, as those rules give a clear guidance and provide proven ways on how to do things. The three parts Palantir mentions are good examples for this:
Menu system - Provides a well structured and effective dispatching mechanism that is easy to extend with your own stuff, while giving huge flexibility to tweak/manipulate existing/default paths. (Note that 'menu system' in Drupal denotes the whole topic of managing your URL space, not just the subset of 'visible' menus that is usually associated with the term)
Forms API - A declarative approach to web forms, with a well designed processing workflow and a whole lot of built in security features that you would otherwise have to take care of yourself. Also highly extensible, with straight options to adjust/extend already existing forms on demand, add new validation rules to any field or whole forms, multi step forms, javascript based form adjustments, etc.
Translation system - This is pretty complex, simply because internationalization is fricking hard to do. But it is built in, again giving clear guidance on how to do things in order to work in a generic way (though there are problems with quite some contributed modules that are not using/supporting it the way they should).
I could give more examples for parts where I appreciate the 'rules', but this post is getting long already, and I still have to cover some downsides ;)
So to sum up the positive part - if I where given the rough specs you posted, I'd say 'no problem' and go with Drupal, being confident that it would be a solid foundation for the custom parts, while providing all the 'standards' like forum, blogs, twitter/facebook integration and many, many others in the form of already existing solutions (even though those might need some adaption/tweaking).
Downsides: As always, there are flaws, and some of them are substantial, depending on requirements/circumstances.
Learning curve - Drupal is quite complex, and 'grokking' its concepts takes time. 'Playing with it for a week', as Palantir suggests, will certainly give you a general feeling/broad impression, but it is in no way enough to allow for a serious judgement of its pros and cons, as those will only surface while coding in/for it. So if you are already deeply familiar with an established web development framework, this might be an issue. If you have to learn one anyways, this should be less of a problem.
Database restrictions - As of Drupal 6, database support is MySQL or PostgreSQL only, using a Drupal specific 'abstraction layer' (which obviously isn't one ;)
Drupal 7 will move to PDO, which should (finally) end this questionable state.
Test/Stage/Production migrations - Parts of Drupals 'out of the box' flexibility are due to many things being configurable in the administrative backend, which implies that many important configuration settings are stored in the database. This makes migration of data and/or configuration between several instances pretty difficult/tedious, once you left the (early) stages of development where you can get away with complete dump/restore operations (see e.g. this question & answers)
These are the main ones for me, but you'll probably find more :)
I worked for over a year using drupal extensively, but I ended up abandoning it. Drupal, and other CMS systems out there, have very rigid limits and rules. I'd use Drupal for projects where you have simple requirements and few or no business rules. Drupal gets complicated almost immediately when you want to do complex things (especially pay attention at the menu system, forms, and the translation system if you need to be multilingual).
If your system will really be large, with all the things you mentioned, then I'd rather use a PHP framework to implement your business logic, and integrate external products as they fit (a forum, a blog, a twitter client, etc...).
But the advice is: don't trust anyone :) Download it, and play with it for a week. You'll be able to make your mind and be more confident about your choice!
As Drupal is open source, you can pretty much do as you wish with it. A couple of points though:
Changing Drupal's user/role structure would be tedious and unnecessary. You would need to have your desktop application authenticate from Drupal's MySQL database.
Drupal has hundreds of plugins for just about everything, so Drupal could no doubt run the whole "web" side of things including visitor stats etc. You would just need, again, to connect your desktop application to the correct MySQL tables and show the data as desired.
Don't forget to check other content management systems such as Joomla! (and many others). Each has its pros and cons. www.opensourcecms.com allows you to easily test CMSs and I've used it extensively in the past.
Just be sure to map out all the components first. Every hour planning up front saves many hours of headaches later.