Recently i received another Packt Publishing book, this time with Drupal as the subject. The title of the book is Drupal 6 Performance Tips and i found it to be a very good and helpful companion anytime you need to fine-tune a Drupal installation for heavy traffic sites.
The book is written by Trevor James and TJ Holowaychuk, both of the authors being experienced web developers with quite a few projects behind. Drupal 6 Performance Tips is structured into 9 chapters, each dealing with a specific task of optimization or enhancement.
The first chapter is dedicated to the process of upgrading Drupal, most importantly the book deals with upgrading Drupal from versions 5.x, a subject that is quite interesting to many of you.
The second chapter deals with the maintaining of your Drupal site. From caching to cron and from cleaning up files to tweaking .htaccess you can find many useful tips in this chapter.
Speaking of useful tips, in the third chapter developers can get quite a few tips on using development modules and tools. This is a must read for every beginner developer but experienced developers can learn a few things too.
Chapters 4,5 and 6 have performance in focus. The authors offer performance optimization advices and teach you how to use the DB Maintenance module, the Throttle module, the Boost module and the Advanced Boost module.
The seventh chapter is especially interesting as it deals with using Memcache API and integration. This is an exhaustive guide that deals with everything, from installing Memcached libraries and service to more advanced subjects such as running memcache without saving cache to the database.
Chapter 8 is for tips on Advanced Caching techniques, this chapter deals with Authenticated User Page Caching (Authcache) among other things, so it is very handy when you have quite a lot of pages that needs to be served to authenticated users.
The last chapter, chapter 9 is dedicated to Drupal Multisite configuration and performance. How to set up multiple websites on the same Drupal installation is explained in a detailed manner and also examples are presented.
Without doubt this book is a must have for people who are working on high traffic websites and who care about the performance of their site. And everyone should care about the performance of the site because bad performance can not only hurt you financially (more servers needed) but can drive away your visitors and Google’s bots (yes, recently Google announced that site speed is a factor in ranking of the websites).
Laszlo Bodor
