Performance

By default, Drupal allows a site wide cache, which is sufficient for most sites. What if you wanted differnt cache time for various pages?

Pipelining web pages for high performance

Attention: this module is experimental. Not recommended for live sites. Testing and feature requests are welcome to get a stable module.

This module is based on the Facebook's BigPipe functionality to serve pieces of pages instead of complete pages.

It requires the Jquery Update module to use the jQuery.live function and BigPipe most of the links but the ones that already have other functionality. You can integrate it with Drupal Chat and get the desired non-blinking effect.

What it does is to load a javascript "manifest" into a hidden iframe with the proper instructions of what is needed to do to update the current page and perform the necessary changes. Basically, it loads contents, scripts and styles dinamically.

Currently, most of the performance gain is on the client side. On the server, processing is almost the same as without BigPipe. This is intended to be improved by integrating with the Context module and find an intelligent way to or not to process certain stuff.

Cloud Files allows you to replace the local file system with a cloud server via Rackspace Cloud Files, utilizing their unlimited storage and blazing fast CDN. Files uploaded into Drupal will still be managed by Drupal, but instead of being stored on the local server that is running Drupal, actual files will be stored on Rackspace Cloud Files and delivered through the CDN.

Cloud Files can be used as the default file system, or configured for specific file/image fields.

One Appliance to Rule Them All

Well, to make them play nice together anyway...

I was looking for a production/staging server build script or appliance that had LAMP, Webmin, Aegir, ISPConfig, and all the Drupal dependencies on top of a long term support (LTS) version of uBuntu.

On top of web and database services, I also wanted email and DNS, open source anti-spam and anti-virus, a firewall, and protection from DOS and other similar attacks. I also wanted all my admin interfaces to use SSL and I wanted secure SMTP enabled.

Basically, I wanted the offspring of a debaucherous affair between Webmin, Aegir, a slightly hardened LAMP, ISPConfig, and Drupal. I wanted - WALID.

Meet WALID. It's that genetically engineered super offspring.

WALID's the output of a build script that smaller-scale Drupal developers can use to quickly build a production server on a Cloud or Dedicated VPS (or download as an appliance). For Drupal developers that need more than shared hosting but aren't experienced in building or maintaining Linux servers, this will get you going. For developers who have reached a certain level in their Drupal-fu but who aren't experienced with Linux, WALID is a relatively secure and stable Drupal-centric production environment that can be managed via secure web interfaces by even non-Linux pros. [This is the goal anyway...]

High performance integration with WinCache.

This module provides a graph where you can see the size of the cache tables and labels marking some of the events that may empty the cache.