#369: Drupal-level performance enhancements

jim — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 23:23:27 GMT

Per TTech discussion, some easy/quick things we can do to improve the site's performance... In rough order of ease technically and politically:

Trawl SQL logs for slow queries, find out what's causing them and eradicate the cause -- tough job but potentially huge returns.
Add flood control/DoS blocking and other temporary blocks at the server level if an IP address or crawler bot is taking the piss. A job for Chris.
~~Do config/performance enhancement ideas from DB Tuner (was in mysqltuner.log, JK to run again around xmas)~~
~~Disable Piwik on LIVE and use Google Analytics instead OR move Piwik to another server. Chris is opposed to this but server resources are at a premium unfortunately -- See #371~~
Massively shrink site CSS -- Small performance increase for 'normal' users, BIG gains for older computers and mobile devices - As Laura points out, better than lots of images, but it still needs to re-use CSS rules/selectors where possible and throw out legacy code.
Force HTTP only for non-logged in users (explained above) -- BIG boost, quick settings change, though might need Chris to alter htaccess/varnish setup.
~~Enable Throttle module to auto-disable modules during heavy loads -- Throttle gets a bad press and can cause issues.~~
Go on a module cull -- This is hard and slow, and will result in a loss of functionality. But some modules could be dropped if there's a will.
~~Switch to NGINX -- Chris thinks this is a lot of work, see #357~~

Transition Technology: Ticket Query