Jaesin's sandbox: Static Routes

Static routes for Drupal

Motivation

It’s true that you could add some static HTML files to your Drupal site if you wanted to but URL paths these days aren’t always that simple. In the spirit of maintaining nice URLs this module aims to provide a mechanism serve static files from arbitrary paths that would normally be handled by the routing system.

Usage

Static routes are defined in settings.php as an array of static assets keyed by a route match pattern. The pattern syntax is the same as what’s used by the path.matcher service except is not supported because it requires loading config which adds additional overhead to the delivery process.

Example:

<?php
// Define route patterns for static assets.
$settings['static_routes'] = [
  "/blog\n/blog/*" => DRUPAL_ROOT . '/assets/static/blog/index.html',
];
?>

Performance

The default implementation uses a HTTP middleware. The middleware will search for static route matches and deliver static assets via a BinaryFileResponse. By the time the middleware gets called, Drupal has already done quite a bit of work. For this reason, the best throughput we were able to achieve is ~600 requests / second with an average latency of ~170 milliseconds. It’s not bad but compared to serving a static html file via nginx (~32K Req/sew) it could use some improvement. For reference a Drupal node page tested at ~190 requests/s with a latency of ~520 milliseconds.

So a faster method was created to help with throughput and latency. Using static_routes_fast_pass() is optional but can be used to help performance. It was designed to be used directly in settings.php but it could also be used in an altered index.php file.

As implemented in settings.php:

<?php
// Define route patterns for static assets.
$settings['static_routes'] = [
  "/blog\n/blog/*" => DRUPAL_ROOT . '/assets/static/blog/index.html',
];

// Use the static route fast pass to increase performance.
if(file_exists(DRUPAL_ROOT . '/modules/contrib/static_routes/static_routes.module')) {
  include_once DRUPAL_ROOT . '/modules/contrib/static_routes/static_routes.module';
  static_routes_fast_pass($settings['static_routes']);
}
?>

This function will die early once it has written the file to the output buffer so it is able to achieve ~4000 requests per second with an average latency of ~30 milliseconds.

Testing was done on a local nginx setup with php 7.1 via php-fpm. Wrk was used with 20 threads: wrk -t20 -c400 -d10s http://foo.com/blog.

This is only really useful for static assets with public URLs If you are embedding assets in a page or referencing JS/CSS, it is better to link to them via their static paths to avoid the overhead of bootstrapping drupal at all.