From Varnish and Drupal Tuning to Platform Engineering
In 2013 I wrote about Varnish in front of Drupal and where Drupal sites actually lose performance. The stack was Apache, PHP, MySQL, SSH, and a lot of hand-tuning. Today I work on AWS Batch, multi-region Terraform, and hybrid lab-to-cloud integrations in life sciences. The logos changed; the job did not.
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How to Improve the Performance of Drupal Sites
A site is only as fast as its last mile connectivity. If users access a site from a slow connection, even a site capable of responding quickly to requests will appear to be slow. A content management system like Drupal throws in additional challenges to the Web architect in improving performance because, typically, the Apache process takes up more space than a site serving traditional HTML or PHP pages. Read on to take a look at the various external factors that impact performance, and explore ways to mitigate them.
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Cache HTTP Reverse Proxy Using Varnish on Ubuntu with Drupal 7
Varnish Cache is a web application accelerator also known as a caching HTTP reverse proxy. You install it in front of any server that speaks HTTP and configure it to cache the contents. Varnish Cache is really, really fast. It typically speeds up delivery with a factor of 300 – 1000x, depending on your architecture.
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