performance

Drush Cron & XCache can cause var_size errors

14 April 2010
Drupal performance tips

I use a cron script on this server which fires up Drush to run Cron (rather than the standard wget method). There is nothing wrong with using wget, however it does tie up an apache or lighttpd process while cron is running. It also means it's harder to control process priority. Drush, on the other hand, runs in CLI mode, so controlling process priority is easier (using nice). But then I started seeing odd errors…

XCache Variables, Drupal Page Cache and page_cache_fastpath()

24 February 2010
tips programming performance How to Drupal

I run XCache on the server that powers this site. XCache is cool. Out of the box, it allows caching of PHP compile code in memory, after all once a file is compile you shouldn't keep needing to compile it on every page load, should you?

Drupal, ImageCache & Performance

14 November 2009
performance How to geek Drupal

A while ago we started having issues running a website. Bandwidth. Upon investigation, we saw that the majority of bandwidth was being use by image files and of those, lot was from the ImageCache folder. It was also causing a lot of excess server load by consuming Apache processes. Something needed to be done.