drupal with more than 100000 nodes, performance increase to vey high

Question

I have a drupal site with more than 100000 nodes and counting.

I want to know, how can I increase the site performance dramatically.

There are certain days when traffic is high and the site becomes really slow. The site also uses views heavily and the frontpage is panels based.

With the same resources I have now, what can I do to increase the performance.

Answer 1

Have a read of Drupal caching, speed and performance, that should give you an idea of where to start. From the sound of it, caching would be a good idea.

Answer 2

To increase performance you really need to do some profiling and find out what it is you should be optimizing. It's easy to optimize all sorts of things, but you need to find out what the problem is on your site.

For high traffic sites, a good cache strategy, is very important.

You can consider using Pressflow, to cut off some of the performance hit there is to Drupal suporting php 4.

Answer 3

I would second fredley's suggestion to read up on Drupal Caching speed and performance on the link he has provided. However a quick way to optimize your site would be to use the boost module. ( http://drupal.org/project/boost ). Boost caches the HTML output of each URL (when accessed). Subsequent access to the same URL, causes the cached HTML to be sent and so PHP scripts don't need to run and consequently, neither is the database accessed. Your Apache server is blindingly fast at serving HTML pages so your server load goes down and responsiveness goes up. Boost is very intelligent e.g. if someone comments on a node it will expire that page and so on.

Please note that Boost only makes sense if your site is for anonymous users. For logged in users you will need to employ other strategies e.g. memcache etc.

Please also make sure simple things in the performance settings of your drupal site like CSS aggregation ("CSS optimization") and Javascript aggreation ("JS optimzation"), default caching options etc are enabled.

There is a lot of information available on performance optimzation so it can be overwhelming at first. If you're a book kind of person then check out https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-6-performance-tips-to-maximize-and-optimize-your-framework/book