Drupal 8 - Front End Performance

Compared to Drupal 7, Drupal 8 has brought numerous mechanisms which make its front end rendering highly efficient.

In Drupal 7, caching was not selective and hence was inefficient; changing any one cache item needed the entire cache to be cleared and regenerated. Also, in Drupal 7 the front end is rendered via php template for each request made even if it is a repetitive request, which makes the front end slow.

Introduction of Drupal 8 has significantly enhanced its front end. The above mentioned issues are all handled in Drupal 8. It has selective and tag based caching due to which a specific cache can be cleared and regenerated without affecting the entire cache. Similarly, with Twig being in core of Drupal 8, the subsequent requests made for the front end elements are handled from the previously stored and compiled HTML hence making the front end efficient.

In this session we will explore the performance of the front end in Drupal 8. We will be talking about the changes or enhancements that Drupal 8 has brought with itself that makes it better than previous  versions. and we will briefly have a look at the tools and methods that can be used to test the front end performance in Drupal 8 and finally, how we can further improve the performance of the front end in Drupal 8.

What we'll discuss:

• Drupal 8 FrontEnd

• Tools used to measure performance

• Responsive in the core - how?

• Twig (D8) vs phptemplate (D7) - Performance

• Improved Caching mechanism in D8

• Additional features which boost front end performance in Drupal 8

• Even more tools available for increasing performance