Drupal 6 Performance Tips Learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal framework using Drupal 6 best practice performance solutions and tools Trevor James TJ Holowaychuk BIRMINGHAM - MUMBAI This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info Drupal 6 Performance Tips Copyright © 2010 Packt Publishing All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embedded in critical articles or reviews. Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied. Neither the authors, Packt Publishing, nor its dealers or distributors will be held liable for any damages caused or alleged to be caused directly or indirectly by this book. Packt Publishing has endeavored to provide trademark information about all the companies and products mentioned in this book by the appropriate use of capitals. However, Packt Publishing cannot guarantee the accuracy of this information. First published: February 2010 Production Reference: 1080210 Published by Packt Publishing Ltd. 32 Lincoln Road Olton Birmingham, B27 6PA, UK. ISBN 978-1-847195-84-5 www.packtpub.com Cover Image by Nilesh Mohite (nilpreet2000@yahoo.co.in) This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info Credits Authors Trevor James TJ Holowaychuk Reviewers Daniel Hanold Joeri Poesen Acquisition Editor Douglas Paterson Development Editor Steven Wilding Technical Editor Akash Johari Copy Editor Lakshmi Menon Indexer Hemangini Bari Editorial Team Leader Akshara Aware Project Team Leader Lata Basantani Project Coordinator Joel Goveya Proofreader Kevin McGowan Production Coordinator Shantanu Zagade Cover Work Shantanu Zagade This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info About the Authors Trevor James is a Drupal developer and web designer based in Middletown, MD, USA. Trevor has been designing websites for 13 years using a combination of HTML, XHTML, CSS, and ColdFusion, and has been using Drupal intensively for more than 2 years. Trevor's focus is on building web portals for higher education, public education (K-12), non-prot and small business environments. He is interested in the best methods of developing Drupal themes, Drupal site performance, and using CCK, Views, and Panels to develop frontend interfaces to support data intensive websites. He loves teaching people about Drupal and how to use this excellent open source content management framework. Trevor has designed and developed websites for many non-prot, education-based, and small business organizations. He is currently working on a number of Drupal-related projects. Trevor created an 11.5 hour video tutorial series comprising 114 lessons titled Introduction to Drupal 6 for VTC (Virtual Training Company) in 2009. The video is available via the VTC website here: http://www.vtc.com/products/ Introduction-To-Drupal-6-Tutorials.htm This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info A huge thank you to my wife, Veronica, and our two beautiful twin girls, Francesca and Clare, for their love and support while I was writing this book. Thanks to my father-in-law, Tony Gornik, for offering his residence in Hershey, PA, as writing space on weekends. The quiet and slower pace of Hershey helped inspire the writing of these chapters. Many thanks to the Hershey Fire Company crew for giving me and my twin daughters tours of the big trucks during the much-needed writing breaks. Many thanks to the entire Packt editorial and project team for inviting me to work on this project and for continuing to publish excellent titles on Drupal and open source applications. More thanks to Steven Wilding, Packt Acquisition Editor; Joel Goveya, Project Coordinator; Akash Johari, Technical Editor; Lata Basantani, Projects Team Leader; and Patricia Weir, for keeping the project on track and for guiding me in the construction of this title. I look forward to working with you all again in the near future. TJ Holowaychuk, the president of http://vision-media.ca, is a self-taught web development guru whose skills range from high performance programming in C to agile and elegant solutions written in Ruby or PHP. He has contributed to and started over 50 open source projects including Drupal, JSpec, Evolution CMS, and jQuery. With such a large array of skills, TJ provides a unique perspective with all challenges regarding performance, design, or development. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info About the Reviewers Daniel Hanold is a software developer and business consultant based in New York City. After graduating from Stuttgart Media University with degrees in IT and Economics, he co-founded PeoplesMD, an online patient education resource. He began his love affair with Drupal shortly afterwards. Equipped with his background in PHP and MySQL, Daniel creates applications ranging from brochure websites for high-prole clients to social networks for non- prot organizations. Daniel is an expert in combining CSS, JavaScript, and jQuery to make user interactions with any application as simple, elegant, and efcient as possible. Currently, Daniel focuses on large scale community websites and performance optimization using technologies such as Apache Solr and Memcached. His personal blog can be found at http://danielhanold.com. Joeri Poesen is a longtime Drupal user, developer, and trainer. He loves nothing more than scouring the planet, learning how open source tools such as Drupal empower individuals and organizations, and how he can contribute to their adoption. When not traveling or organizing community events, Joeri is probably giving a Drupal training session somewhere in Europe—most likely in Paris, France. I'd like to thank my wife Lies for her endless patience and support. We've been through some crazy things together the last 12 years, and I've got a feeling that we ain't seen nothin' yet. This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info This book is dedicated to my parents, Michael and Judy James, who taught me the value of hard work and dedication to the task at hand. —Trevor James This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 www.it-ebooks.info [...]... tutorials on drupal. org at the following URLs/pages: • Upgrading from previous versions: http:/ /drupal. org/upgrade/ • Upgrading from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6. x: http:/ /drupal. org/ videocasts/upgrading-to -6 Upgrading Drupal 5.x core Before we perform a major upgrade from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6. x, we need to make sure our Drupal 5.x core and contributed modules are upgraded to the latest 5.x releases For Drupal. .. site's performance, as these patch releases fix minor and major issues reported from Drupal' s bug tracking tools Many performance issues and security issues with the Drupal code are fixed on a weekly to monthly basis by Drupal developers working with the Drupal project Besides security patches, Drupal releases major upgrades every 1-2 years The most recent major upgrade was from Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6. x... viewer 52 55 57 57 58 59 61 65 67 68 69 70 73 74 77 78 80 82 82 84 84 86 87 88 89 92 95 98 100 100 101 101 101 103 103 104 104 105 105 105 [ ii ] www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Table of Contents Theme registry Variable editor 1 06 1 06 Summary 108 Chapter 4: Performance Optimization... Plans are underway now for the next major release, Drupal 7.x It's good practice to begin the process of upgrading your Drupal 5.x site to Drupal 6. x as soon as possible, so you'll be in a better position to eventually upgrade and use Drupal 7.x Major Drupal releases often solve performance issues reported over months and years by Drupal developers using Drupal sites It's to your benefit and your site's... your Drupal 5.x core to the latest 5.x version, and upgrading your Drupal 5.x contributed modules to the latest 5.x versions • Backing up your entire Drupal site and database • Running Status report • Taking your Drupal site offline for maintenance • Upgrading your Drupal 5.x site to Drupal 6. x • Upgrading your contributed modules to the latest 6. x versions • Running update.php • Placing your new Drupal. .. cover throughout, the Drupal community, but this book does not claim to cover every performance and site optimization issue The authors have done their best to cover the majority of performance- based tips and tricks to run your Drupal site They hope that the book will enhance the discussion of Drupal performance, and pave the way for more books and tutorials to be released on Drupal performance topics... and advanced Drupal users and developers www.it-ebooks.info This material is copyright and is licensed for the sole use by jackie tracey on 23rd February 2010 953 Quincy Drive, , Brick, , 08724 Preface What this book covers Chapter 1, Upgrading Drupal, focuses on preparing a Drupal environment for running a high performance Drupal website We will discuss upgrading Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6. x, creating... 08724 Upgrading Drupal To run a high performance and secure Drupal website, you should keep your Drupal core code and your contributed Drupal module code patched and upgraded regularly The Drupal project frequently releases updated security patches to its core code and it should be a standard maintenance workflow for you as a Drupal developer to keep your site patched to the latest core Drupal release... need the Drupal Content Management framework, which is available from drupal. org We will discuss downloading and installing Drupal in Chapter 1 Who this book is for This book is for Drupal website users and developers who want to boost and tweak performance on their website using Drupal' s core and contributed performance module functionality You are expected to know about the basic operation of Drupal, ... running the Drupal Status report, upgrading contributed modules to their latest 6. x versions, and running update.php We will also tweak our PHP settings using the Drupal settings.php file Chapter 2, Maintaining your Drupal Site, covers the basics of maintaining your Drupal website including inspecting your Drupal configuration file, checking your MySQL and PHP configurations, enabling and using the Drupal . Drupal 6 Performance Tips Learn how to maximize and optimize your Drupal framework using Drupal 6 best practice performance solutions and tools Trevor. to Drupal caching 59 Enabling and configuring Drupal caching 61 Cache tables in your MySQL database 65 Clearing your performance cache 67 Clearing your theme registry 68 Running cron manually 69 Installing. covers Chapter 1, Upgrading Drupal, focuses on preparing a Drupal environment for running a high performance Drupal website. We will discuss upgrading Drupal 5.x to Drupal 6. x, creating backups of