{"id":45606,"date":"2017-02-08T15:37:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-08T10:07:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/?p=45606"},"modified":"2017-05-01T15:35:09","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T10:05:09","slug":"best-practices-to-optimize-performance-in-drupal-8","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tothenew.com\/blog\/best-practices-to-optimize-performance-in-drupal-8\/","title":{"rendered":"Best Practices to Optimize Performance in Drupal 8"},"content":{"rendered":"

Drupal<\/strong>, a content management system has the\u00a0capability to serve large data in different formats based on business need. A business requirement could be a data exchange between two web properties or sourcing a data or consuming data from external sources. Also, Drupal<\/a>\u00a0is gaining confidence\u00a0in today\u2019s market and also widely being used as SAAS. Now questions raised by big organizations before adopting Drupal is about its ability in terms of functionalities, features, compatibility, flexibility and most important performance.<\/span><\/p>\n

Performance is a\u00a0most crucial piece in any web\/desktop application. It can truly turn down the market of any application. For example: A chariot can comfortably pull 3 men with two horses however if few more people board the same chariot, it will either not work or the speed will be reduced. This is simply because you are running a chariot with a wrong infrastructure and the same analogy holds true in the\u00a0case of a web\/desktop application.\u00a0There’s\u00a0<\/span>no disclaimer with an application like it will perform with only a specific kind of infrastructure or it will serve the content to only specific concurrent users or about the page load time. And there are no benchmarks given on any of the competitive portals like WordPress , Joomla or other CMS.<\/p>\n

The intent to write this blog is to help you think in a different direction, i.e. if a\u00a0site is not performing well as expected then it is imperative to understand the underlying issue and find an appropriate solution to optimize the performance rather than blaming the capabilities of the CMS. I will provide few insights of Drupal 8<\/a>. Drupal 8 is new, elegant and more promising as compared to its earlier versions 6\/7. \u00a0The process to improve performance can be almost similar in all the versions, but unless you have some in-depth understanding you will not be able to handle critical situations.<\/p>\n

Outlined below are few key points to keep in mind for performance optimization.<\/p>\n

1)\u00a0<\/b>\u201c<\/span>Avoid any manual configuration of standard settings as application core code changes over time.<\/b>\u201d Drupal community keeps a track of performance loose poles and detects Drupal application components and dependencies and optimize it in every new core updates.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drupal 8 started with merging 100s of contributed modules in it. This gives a strong backend and flexibility to handle complex data structure. Merging these modules in core isn’t easy as these modules are ported from Drupal 7 to Drupal 8 and then are merged. Stability of these ported\/merged module was hindering at an early age of Drupal 8 in 2016 but now it has become quite stable. To stablize these ported core modules in projects; the developers have modified codes which does not follow the Drupal\/Symfony standard and can impact the performance.<\/p>\n

2)\u00a0\u201c<\/span>List valuable transactions for monitoring in order to optimize performance<\/b>\u201d. We should not get bog down to unnecessary smaller operations instead should focus on critical operations of the site or the area where user hits are atmost. Basically this requires understanding of client-side performance impact which correlates to browser and device performance to originating site performance metrics.<\/span><\/p>\n

Drupal 8 deployment requires an adequate cache strategy which should minimize database interactions before we actually see the database load on the server. Areas below must be overlooked before originating performance metrics :<\/p>\n