Performance

Summary

Note: AdvAgg needs a major rework for Drupal 10.1 - recommend holding update or disabling AdvAgg until a new release comes out.

This module is an replacement for the Cookie Cache Bypass module that is a part of the Drupal 6 Pressflow distribution.

The purpose of the module is to set a short-lived NO_CACHE cookie on form submissions so that when using a reverse-proxy (such as Varnish) you could be certain that your site visitors would get dynamic pages after form submissions.

This module performs the same function, but adds some customizations for users.

1. Rather than taking the minimum cache lifetime and adding 300 seconds to it as the lifetime for the NO_CACHE cookie (this could be anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 day + 5 minutes) we allow the user to set the time they would like that cookie to persist for.
2. Rather than setting the cookie path for / (the entire site) we allow users to choose to set for / or the value of request_uri() followed by a trailing slash. This means that if your form is at URL /foo and your post-form pages are always /foo/something-else, then this setting will increase your cache hits. See http://php.net/setcookie and read the information on the 'path' parameter for more information.

The modular external cache invalidation framework.

This module integrates Node.js with Drupal.

What and Why

Drupal has expensive 404 errors. On an 'average' site with an 'average' module load, you can be looking at 60-100MB of memory being consumed on your server to deliver a 404. Consider a page with a bad .gif link and a missing .css file. That page will generate 2 404s along with the actual load of the page. You are most likely looking at 180MB of memory to server that page rather than the 60MB it should take.

That's where Fast 404 comes in. This module combines a very common method of handling missing image/file 404 errors (discussed here and planned for Drupal 8) with a method created by dpardo (a co-maintainer of this project) to deliver super fast 404 error pages for both missing images and bad paths. Depending on which method of implementation you choose (aggressive or super aggressive) you can deliver 404 errors using less than 1MB of memory on your server.

Drupal 7 Core Updates

Drupal 7 core has updated to add a rudimentary version of what this module implements. It allows you to set an excluded set of paths, a list of extensions to Fast 404 on, as well as the plain HTML that is delivered.

Issue describing: http://drupal.org/node/76824
Patch added: http://drupal.org/files/issues/404_fast_paths_7x-76824-328.patch