New Relic: Understanding and Optimizing Drupal Performance

Making your Drupal site scalable and performant is one of the most important things you can do as a developer. Even if your site isn’t destined to do millions of requests a day, having a fast site will help the users you do have and having a scalable site will matter a ton on the day your content goes viral.

While there are many, many, many solutions for performance problems in Drupal, it is often difficult to figure out which solution to use because the problem you are having may not be clear. Is the problem a bottleneck in PHP or is it in the database? Does the problem occur for all users on all pages or just users on certain pages? Is this a new problem or has it been there since the beginning? Does this weird external web service call have anything to do with my slow page load times?

Enter New Relic, a PHP application performance tool. New Relic is a PHP agent that runs on your webserver to logs and monitor the performance you are having for your site. It is AWARE of where your site is spending its time: be it in PHP, the Database, or an external service. It is AWARE of what parts of Drupal is taking time: be it modules, hooks, or views. It is AWARE of when you do deployments and how it changes your performance.

Come to this session to learn how to use the tool on your site.
See graphs. Make changes. Go fast.