Drupal 7 is slow, speed it up by turning off a few things
Slow>turn off some modules
I have also the experience that D7 is slower than D6, but after some tweaking I think the difference is minimal, I have Drupal running on a shared host, based on comments of other people and my own experience: Drupal is slow Client Side because some modules use javascript and weigh heavily on your own CPU, so:
- switch off the overlay module (drush dis overlay toolbar)
- switch off the toolbar module (which always hovers over your page at the same position, don´t know if its javascript of absolute CSS positioning, but it makes it slow) and install the administration menu (drush dl admin_menu) module. It works better and faster.
- You will also need to tune MySQL innodb database engine as that is now the default database for Drupal 7. I found that after I had done #1 and #2, tuning the innodb made a pretty big difference for some dynamic pages. For more see my Tuning Innodb page.
and Drupal is slow because of Server Side Caching and things
- Switch off the Devel modules if you have them installed
- switch off the Update Manager Module (drush dis update)
Now my Drupal seems still a bit slow on admin pages (with several modules installed), but not much slower than D6.
Tune Apache
Turn on Keep Alive to allow more than one part of a web page to be downloaded from the server at once. Change the settings in the apache config (/etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf on CentOS)
Drupal6 can be sped up too
compressing the CSS file from Drupal can really help pages. Download the CSS_Gzip module and install it.
