Progenitor Performance

This Progenitor Stack provides the dependencies and a module for basic caching and performance optimization with Varnish, Memcached, and other tricks internal to the Drupal app.

Use Cases

• The site should be fast for anonymous traffic.
• The site should scale for anonymous traffic.
• The site should not perform poorly for limited authenticated traffic.

Usage

• Download this stack with drush make for automatic processing of the makefile.
• Enable the module to turn on dependencies and set better defaults.
• Leave the module enabled to rely on it for functionality or to mitigate database conflicts between the modules it recommends.

Setup

Copy the following memcached and varnish snippets to your settings.php file. If you are using a dedicated common.settings.php for core settings, place part 1 there and part 2 in the individual site settings.

Part 1

Note: Update the path to the respective modules as needed.

:::php
// Add Varnish as the page cache handler.
$conf['cache_backends'][] = 'sites/all/modules/varnish/varnish.cache.inc';
$conf['cache_class_cache_page'] = 'VarnishCache';
// Drupal 7 does not cache pages when we invoke hooks during bootstrap. This needs
// to be disabled.
$conf['page_cache_invoke_hooks'] = FALSE;

:::php
// Add Memcache for internal caching.
$conf['cache_backends'][] = 'sites/all/modules/memcached/memcache.inc';
$conf['cache_default_class'] = 'MemCacheDrupal';
$conf['cache_class_cache_form'] = 'DrupalDatabaseCache';
$conf['lock_inc'] = 'sites/all/modules/memcache/memcache-lock.inc';
$conf['memcache_stampede_protection'] = TRUE;
$conf['memcache_servers'] = array(
  '127.0.0.1:11211' => 'default',
);
$conf['memcache_bins'] = array(
 'cache' => 'default',
);

Part 2

The following shoudl be configured per site instance, it allows multiple sites to share the same memcache service.

:::php
$conf['memcache_key_prefix'] = 'site_prefix_';

Recommendations

If you are using a Platform-as-a-Service hosting provider, this stack is probably not the way to go.

Keywords

scalability, performance, infrastructure