I have been recently been working for an agency in Windsor on a huge project for a massive Japanese automotive company working on their website. The website serves all the companies UK dealerships. The solution was of course Drupal and domain access working off AWS. The website was underperforming and load time was not something to be desired.
Bring out Varnish (not the nail type)
So the next step was to install Varnish. What is varnish you may ask? Well Varnish is in simple terms it’s a web accelerator which caches content of a website. This was installed onto the Ubuntu server box and then configured to work with Drupal 7.
Currently there is a module for Drupal 7 funnily enough called Varnish, however this does not support Varnish 3.x and is a bit sluggish. So the next step in any big Drupal website, which requires performance is Pressflow.
There are 2 releases for both Drupal core versions; Drupal 6 Pressflow its features and enhanced code were committed to Drupal 7 core, however Drupal 7 Pressflow does further enhance performance of the site, with built in integration with Varnish. This was definitely recognised when Varnish was restarted after the Pressflow install.
Previous load times of 8s before Varnish and Pressflow, were converted to just under 1s, now you can see the benefits of Varnish and Pressflow.
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