Increasing Performance on your Drupal Site

In this video I go over how you can improve the performance of your Drupal Site. Drupal has a few settings that can help the performance by caching and combining style sheets. Drupal performance settings basically has three different options: - Caching Mode - Cache Liftetime - BandwidIn this video I go over how you can improve the performance of your Drupal Site. Drupal has a few settings that can help the performance by caching and combining style sheets.

Drupal performance settings basically has three different options:

1. Caching Mode
2. Cache Liftetime
3. Bandwidth Optimizations for Cascading Style Sheet

What I have found out is that you want to turn these performance settings on at the end of your development cycle, as it may speed up serving the pages, but it slows down development. The reason is if you go and make a change to a page and you want to view the change, you may be viewing a cached page, not the changes page you just modified.

Caching Mode
I recomend as Drupal does to put this at Normal. If you go aggressive, some modules will not work properky on your site. So if you do choose Aggressive, make sure you go through your site to make sure everything is working properly.

Minimum Cache Lifetime
This is how long Drupal will cache a page. If you have a lot of changes throughout the day, you may want to keep this at a lower number. If your site changes every week or once a day, you can choose a higher number. The higher the number, the longer it may take for someone to see a change.

Bandwidth Optimizations
Drupal has a numebr of cascading style sheets (CSS) it uses. On top of that, modules that you have installed will have there own CSS files. The problem is that when someone views a page, the server is serving each one of those CSS files separately. What the best thing would be is if those CSS files were combined into one file. This is that this does... it combines all of the style sheets into one. I personally have had a few issues with this. So I use this on a per site basis. Most of the time it works, but you want to check your site to make sure nothing is messed up.

So there you have it... how to increase the performance of your Drupal site. Pretty easy. Drupal rocks!