By RichieRich on

After suffering from terrible performance from Hostmonster of late - many requests timing out etc, I decided to install the boost module. Result- incredible. I was rather dubious to begin with I'm honestly astounded by the performance improvement. It's like night and day - and to think that I was considering a far more expensive method of improving performance.

The only gripe I have so far is that when I selected not to have my css pages cached by boost the pages were delivered minus styling....as in pure html. Is this expected? Perhaps one for the issue queue.

If you're on shared hosting or you're simply looking at improving performance on a site which is relatively static or subject to a modest number of updates then I recommend that you take a look at it if you haven't done so already.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

boost should be a no brainer for any site that has predominantly anonymous traffic-- highly recommended.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Totally agree. It's that effective that there's surely a good argument for the ability to host static web pages to make it's way into core for Drupal 8. I expected the improvement to be quite modest, and not something which most users would notice...but on installing it it was blown away by the improvement.

Although I'm sure that I'll eventually come across a bug, the module is very well put together, although having to update the .htaccess during the install and whenever options are changed is likely to put off some newcomers. Still, the fact that the module generates the code for you is a real bonus.

After two years of using Drupal I'd honestly say that this is the best module that I'm yet to come across. If somebody forced me to choose, I'd honestly take it over Views (and I use views a lot).

mikeytown2’s picture

mikeytown2 commented

There is a fix in the works for this one drawback
http://drupal.org/project/advagg
Code is there in CVS; it will get packaged up by drupal.org in 9 hours and expect a more polished module next week.

RichieRich’s picture

RichieRich commented

Okay, I have one issue (perhaps I should report it to the issue queue infact).

I noticed that a page generated by views wasn't updated when I added a new node which should have been appended to the top of the list. In the end I had to manually delete the cached .html file to regenerate it (yes, I could have cleared the entire cache via the config screen).

I wanted to use the very handy block which comes with the module to clear the cache, but unfortunately it doesn't get displayed on pages generated by views - only on pages which have views inserted in them with php.

Another crazy thing...since installing this module I've been able to accidentally assign the same URL alias to both a page generated by a view and a node! Don't ask me how I discovered that, but it's now possible. Before I deleted the .html mentioned above accessing the duplicated URL would result in two different pages depending on whether I was logged in or not. Worrying.

naero’s picture

naero commented

Have you had any luck finding out how to use Boost with Views? I have Views within Panels.

I have two issue tickets open here:

http://drupal.org/node/1085554
http://drupal.org/node/1085568