Drupal Performance Tips

Tip 1: Enable the query cache in MySQL
How ??
* You can setup them in /etc/my.cnf (Red Hat) or /etc/mysql/my.cnf (Debian) file:
* # vi /etc/my.cnf
Append config directives as follows:
query_cache_size = 268435456
query_cache_type=1
query_cache_limit=1048576
* You can get the suggestions for my.cnf settings using this script MySQL Performance Tuning Primer Script. Place this script in /etc folder and run using sh /path-to-file/tuning-primer.sh

Tip 2: How to Compress HTML FILES using gzip and Apache mod_deflate

* Add this code in .htaccess

# compress all text & html:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml

# Or, compress certain file types by extension:

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

* If you are in shared hosting then you can try adding this code in page.tpl.php of your drupal theme. Which will compress pages and saves the data transfer and time.
ob_start("ob_gzhandler");
You can check your site Gzip enable or not from here http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/

Tip 3: How to Compress CSS and JS files using gzip.

Drupal 6 core itself Gzip's Js files. To compress CSS files please use http://drupal.org/project/css_gzip.

Tip 4: Optimize your MySQL tables regularly.

The Overhead column in phpMyAdmin's database view is the most common way to determine the need of an OPTIMIZE TABLE query. It essentially shows the amount of disk space you would recover by running an optimize/defragmentation query.

You can set this on cron run using DB Maintenance Module.

Tip 5: Install APC as specified here. http://www.anilsagar.com/blog/how-install-php-apc-linux-improve-drupal-p...

Cheers,
Anil Sagar