Featured image of post Drupal 6 is SLOW
Web Development

Drupal 6 is SLOW

Note: This post was created awhile back on another platform and I migrated to my current one.

Drupal 6 Performance Issues and Optimization

Drupal 6 is incredibly slow right now. Adam and I just installed a lot of modules and enabled them.

Setup

Debian 5 with Apache 2

1st Assumption: Database

Accessing the database could be the reason for the slowdown. Checking the MySQL logs (/var/log) reveals nothing—perhaps I didn’t enable logging. I’ll check on that later.

2nd Assumption: Modules

Let’s disable all the modules! This helped just a little. During this process, I also disabled all caching options in Drupal.

A Surprising Discovery

After taking a day-long break, I checked the website again, and it was fast! However, when clicking on the administration URL, it was still very slow. Here’s what I found on the Drupal support forum:

“The admin pages in Drupal 6 are slow because they perform a lot of housekeeping and rebuilding (thousands of queries, as you noticed, and these are not just cosmetic). Caching probably won’t help with that.

If it is unworkable, disabling the update status module will probably help a bit. There are open issues for reducing the number of queries in future updates, but don’t expect the D6 admin pages to become snappy. They take the hit for some tasks that make the user part of the site more reliable.

About the normal site pages… the usual optimization methods should apply.”

— cog.rusty, February 21, 2009

Optimization Steps

Alright, let’s optimize the webpage.

Installed Tools:

1st Optimization: PHP Optimization with APC

I installed the APC package for PHP (read about it here).
Here’s a tutorial on using APC:
APC on Debian Lenny

Performance Results:

Accessing main Drupal as webmaster:

  • 1st try: 1.3s
  • 2nd try (browser cache cleared): 0.661s
  • 3rd try: 0.877s

As a non-user:

  • 0.536s

Enabling All Modules

  • Main page: 1.114s - 1.124s
  • Content-generated pages: ~0.224s, at most < 0.5s (no images, just text)

Yay, it’s faster! 🚀

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