Make Drupal Sites Nimble - Identifying Bottlenecks with HAR, XDebug, XHProf, and Devel

We live in a time where slow websites are no longer an option.  With increased mobile traffic using slower cellular connections and large companies like Amazon identifying that slow sites cost conversions it's imperative we build optimised, speedy sites. Google now considers page load speed factors in its ranking algorithm, so a slow-loading site could even hurt your client's SEO efforts. With the complexity of Drupal, it's easy for a site to become bloated and slow down and page loads can be like watching an overweight person attempt ballet.  How do you identify the bottlenecks and make your Drupal sites load faster? Or, for the sake of this analogy, how do we turn this person into a world-class dancer?

Short answer, using tools like:

• HAR
• XDebug
• XHProf
• Devel

Using these tools, we can identify problem areas and address them in order to speed up each site.  While this session will mainly focus on coding, identifying slow DB queries and loading assets, I will also talk about the fundamental technologies of the web and how to speed up the delivery of your site by optimising your web server.  I will focus on how to do these perfomance enhancements in Drupal 8 but also show how they can be applied to Drupal 7.