performance archive

mike's picture

Quick & Dirty WordPress Plugin Benchmarking in Debug Bar

by , Director of Digital Strategy

At tonight's PDX WordPress Dev meetup (thanks for the pizza Digital Trends) Daniel Bachhuber had some questions about benchmarking a plugin. Benchmarking WordPress itself is easy, but it's harder to isolate a specific plugin, much less a few calls to preg_match_all() within it. The questioned SEO Auto Linker plugin does this on every page load, so any running time adds latency on every page. Speculation from the meetup is that a PHP regex operating on post content, a blob, and looping through hundreds of links could be pretty slow. Too much caffeine today meant I had to give it a try. Read More…

dylan's picture

Using Amazon Cloudfront with Drupal

by , Lead Development Architect

We like to use our own site to experiment with different technologies. CDN's are nothing new, and Metal Toad has projects running on competing systems including Akamai and Level 3. Still, I think Amazon Cloudfront is an interesting offering and I wanted to give it a spin. Here's my review of the service after setting it up with Drupal: Read More…

dylan's picture

Mobile Drupal optimization results

by , Lead Development Architect

Our responsive redesign has been a great improvement for metaltoad.com. I was still not entirely satisfied with the speed of our site, especially while waiting for my train at the busy Pioneer Square! One of the major obstacles for mobile networks is lag, and so I set out to cut down the number of HTTP requests. By improving the site's stylesheets and scripts, I was able to eliminate a dozen extra requests. Read More…

dylan's picture

Drupal 7: Taking control of CSS and JS aggregation

by , Lead Development Architect

Drupal 7 includes a big re-factor of the way CSS and Javascript are aggregated. What does this mean for your sites? In short: You will see a greater number of files compared to D6 - this is normal and not usually cause for alarm. Surprisingly, more files is sometimes better. To ensure efficient aggregation, the most important thing developers can do is choose the parameters to drupal_add_css and drupal_add_js carefully. And if you encounter contrib modules that are using the wrong parameters, please file patches! This was a somewhat controversial change, and understanding the new strategy (and how to override it) requires going a bit deeper. Read More…

dylan's picture

Faster 404s with Drupal and ImageCache

by , Lead Development Architect

Drupal generates nicely styled 404 pages that are easy to customize. And since 404 responses can be served from the page cache, the performance hit from the occasional stray image can be minimal. However, if you're embedding 3rd-party content (such as ads or social widgets), there is an additional risk that a misbehaving app can generate bogus requests with random-ish query strings. The unpredictable URLs will totally defeat the page cache, so on a really busy site the added load can be crushing. Read More…

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