‘ve been working on the performance of my Drupal site and thought I’d share my results to date in case they might help someone else. My baseline performance using out-of-the-box settings was around 28 requests per second, and the end result is a rate of 68 requests per second.

The site, www.kidpub.com, is lightly loaded, with between 400 and 600 visits per day for a total of 3,000 to 4000 pageviews per day. The system is a dedicated 1.8GHz Celeron with 500M RAM and a 100M ethernet. It’s running CentOS. Apache is 2.0.52. Latest build of Drupal 5 and MySQL 5.

I looked at three main areas for performance tweaking: Apache, MySQL, and PHP. Most of the changes are pretty simple but result in good performance gains.