Drupal 5.x site shows > 550 MB memory consumption of every page. How to speed up Drupal 5.x site.

Question

I developed a site in Drupal 5.x and now its done and working fine, but its very slow. Working fast some time, but for imp modules it takes time.

When I see the performance logs, its consuming my memory for 150 MB per page MINIMUM. This is the minimum. Most of the pages its shows 550~700 MB consumption.

What I did till now.

• Javascript Aggregation Enabled.
• Page caching Enabled.
• Bandwidth Optimization Enabled.
• Slow query log checked under constant check.

My question, what/how exectaly the memory consumption is imp in this application. Drupal automatically takes all the relation between DB and code. Only some few modules are developed by me.

What the the tips/tricks can be used to improve my site speed.

Answer 1

150MB will not be fixed with some aggregation, cache tuning and so on. That is only tweaking.

You (seem to) have a severe problem with one of your modules or a misconfiguration.

Here is what to do, if you are not known to cachegrind, xdebug and such:

1. Disable all contributed modules. Problem gone?
2. if yes, enable them module-by-module. Enabling module X will drop performance, this way you find out what module X is.
3. If you don't see a sudden decrease in performance (or increase in memory usage) it can be due to a combination of modules. In that case, try out disabling and enabling groups of modules.

Remember, 60 modules on a single site is considered rather much. 100+ is considered a nightmare.

If that does not work, or if you prefer a more prefessional (then trial-error) method, try cachegrind. That will show per-file, per-routine memory profiling. You will need cachegrind, Xdebug and a program to visualise the cachegrind output, such as kcachegrind (KDE, reported to work on windows too). More here: http://xdebug.org/docs/profiler

But I am confident that you will find one module that is misbehaving, and that pinning down that module will get you to the solution. A normal Drupal5 site should run just fine under 36M of memory.