FirstServed Tech Blog - FirstServed and the Art of Server Tuning

One of our customers works with drupal… Unless you are from another planet, you know drupal is currently one of the leading open source CMS systems with nice features, but it also is quite a bottleneck on server performance. Not to mention the load on a database server etc…

We suggest drupal hosting customers to opt for a virtual server setup. Does this mean you can’t host drupal on a shared hosting platform? Not at all, but if you have a high load website, a isolated server instance might give you some advantages.This means you can set up a nice isolated environment for a Drupal driven CMS website with dedicated server performance at severe reduced cost.

When setting up the environment be sure to run through the following checklist:

• CentOS 5.3 (for example)
• Apache 2.2 webserver
• MySQL 5+ database server
• PHP 5+
• and, very important: eAccelerator 9.5.3 or higher.

Why the eAccelerator? Well, Drupal uses a lot of cached pages. Enabling Drupal caching already gives you a boost but installing eAccelerator makes sure frequently used php scripts are stored in a compiled state thus allow retrieval faster.

On top of that, you may optimize the MySQL query_caching settings, as they Drupal also uses a lot of the same queries.

You can find the latest version of eAccelerator here: http://eaccelerator.net/

One of our websites is using gettext for displaying dutch and french language. Based on the host header, we define the locale/environment variable. Sometimes it seemed that the locale and the environment variables were getting lost.

After some testing we found the problem, just look at the warning on the PHP website:

"The locale information is maintained per process, not per thread. If you are running PHP on a  multithreaded server api like IIS or Apache on Windows you may experience sudden changes of  locale settings while a script is running although the script itself never called setlocale()  itself. This happens due to other scripts running in different threads of the same process  at the same time changing the processwide locale using setlocale()."