optimization

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

There are a few simple steps you can take to optimize Drupal. Drupal is a large, heavy system: every advantage counts.

This initial benchmark is taken without any of the variables which I'm going to test: css aggregation, mod_deflate, and apc.


ab -n100 http://drupal.shadowlife.ca/drupal-5.7/


Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0
Processing: 24 40 20.4 31 123
Waiting: 21 34 17.2 28 119
Total: 24 40 20.4 31 123