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To help you prepare to launch your new Drupal website and to avoid several common configuration or performance issues, use the suggestions, recommended settings, and information as a prelaunch checklist for your website. Unless otherwise specified, these suggestions apply to all versions of Drupal.
Drupal websites usually require that you install contributed modules to be able to accomplish all of their necessary functions. Here are some recommendations and potential problems to be aware of as you develop your website if you intend to migrate the website to Cloud Platform.
Although none of these modules are required for your website to work with Cloud Platform, we recommend that you install and use these modules with your Cloud Platform-hosted websites to enhance performance and to help you more easily diagnose website issues.
Install and enable the following modules based on your needs and your version of Drupal:
| Module | Description | Drupal 7 | Current Drupal version |
|---|---|---|---|
| Acquia Purge | Gives you significant control over your caches and is designed with Cloud Platform websites in mind. It can help you purge down to the individual node level, which can ensure that new or changed content shows up immediately instead of waiting for the cache to refresh. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Acquia Search modules | Enables your website to integrate with Acquia Search. Depending on your configuration, additional modules are required or recommended. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Cookie Cache Bypass Advanced | Allows you to set cache lifetimes on particular cookies. | ✓ |
Disable and uninstall the following modules or classes of modules:
Cloud Platform
views_ui (part of the Views module), which are not needed on a production website, to reduce your website’s startup (bootstrap) overhead.On the Performance page (URL info), configure or enable the following values:
none.Having the Compress cached pages option enabled can result in Varnish double-compressing page contents. When already-compressed text is compressed again, your website will display characters from the compressed file, rather than the expected website content. We recommend you do the following:
Cloud Platform uses Varnish in front of all of its websites to help ensure responsiveness. Learn more about Varnish. As part of setting up your website on Cloud Platform, you may need to bypass the Varnish cache, set redirects, or purge it entirely.
Memcached is a general-purpose memory cache infrastructure daemon. It can improve Drupal application performance by moving Drupal’s standard caches out of the database and by caching the results of other expensive database operations. Learn more about Memcached.
Secure Socket Layer, or SSL, is of major importance to many websites, and critical for websites serving personal or financial information. The Enabling SSL documentation page provides an overview of how you can use SSL with Cloud Platform.
Several days before DNS cutover, lower your DNS’s Time to Live (TTL) setting to 5–10 minutes. Doing so reduces the amount of time your DNS change will take to propagate when you are ready to turn your new website live, and help you shorten the time that web traffic and email are routed to both your old and new infrastructure. Once the cutover to your new website is complete, you can set your domain’s TTL back to its previous value. Since the method of lowering TTL can differ from provider to provider, you will need to contact your domain name (DNS) provider for specific instructions on how to lower your TTL.
If you’re expecting an event that will send a significant amount of traffic to your website, we encourage you to contact Acquia Support in advance, so that we can help you prevent a website outage. Events that can cause enough traffic to affect your website’s availability include:
For more information on exactly how to notify Acquia of an important event on your website, visit Expecting a high-traffic event.
Acquia recommends the following best practices:
The Acquia documentation and Support knowledge base includes several other articles that may be helpful to you as you configure your new Drupal website, including the following:
If you require additional assistance, Acquia provides additional services to Enterprise and Elite customers that include website installation and configuration.
| Fast 404 | Reduces the level of bootstrap required to serve error pages for requested, nonexistent static assets. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Redirect | Reduces your reliance on path redirects in the .htaccess file. Path redirects need to be loaded at run time for every page request, and having too many redirects can cause website performance problems. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security Kit | Implements a number of protections against serious security issues, such as cross-site scripting and forgeries. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Syslog core module | Stores logs much faster than the Database logging core module. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transliteration | Converts special characters in filenames to ASCII. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Views Litepager | Increases your website’s performance on paginated queries against large datasets. | ✓ | 𐄂 |
Do not override the PHP memory limit on a global basis. Acquia tunes its infrastructure to use the exact number of threads possible for the memory available to your application, and overriding it on a global basis will lead to HTTP 5xx status codes for your website’s users. If your application needs more than 128MB of memory for each page request, create a Support ticket to request your memory allocation be altered to provide fewer threads, but more memory per thread.
Ensure that you’re using InnoDB as your website’s table engine. Although InnoDB is now the default for Drupal, you should confirm that you’re using it instead of the MyISAM table engine, which has performance problems. To examine your current database tables to determine if any other engines are in use, use the following SQL query (where [db_name] is your database’s name):
SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = '[db_name]' AND ENGINE <> 'InnoDB';If you need to convert tables in your database to InnoDB, use this script after you modify it with your own credentials and database information.
If this content did not answer your questions, try searching or contacting our support team for further assistance.
| Fast 404 | Reduces the level of bootstrap required to serve error pages for requested, nonexistent static assets. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Redirect | Reduces your reliance on path redirects in the .htaccess file. Path redirects need to be loaded at run time for every page request, and having too many redirects can cause website performance problems. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Security Kit | Implements a number of protections against serious security issues, such as cross-site scripting and forgeries. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Syslog core module | Stores logs much faster than the Database logging core module. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Transliteration | Converts special characters in filenames to ASCII. | ✓ | ✓ |
| Views Litepager | Increases your website’s performance on paginated queries against large datasets. | ✓ | 𐄂 |
Do not override the PHP memory limit on a global basis. Acquia tunes its infrastructure to use the exact number of threads possible for the memory available to your application, and overriding it on a global basis will lead to HTTP 5xx status codes for your website’s users. If your application needs more than 128MB of memory for each page request, create a Support ticket to request your memory allocation be altered to provide fewer threads, but more memory per thread.
Ensure that you’re using InnoDB as your website’s table engine. Although InnoDB is now the default for Drupal, you should confirm that you’re using it instead of the MyISAM table engine, which has performance problems. To examine your current database tables to determine if any other engines are in use, use the following SQL query (where [db_name] is your database’s name):
SELECT TABLE_NAME FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.TABLES WHERE TABLE_SCHEMA = '[db_name]' AND ENGINE <> 'InnoDB';If you need to convert tables in your database to InnoDB, use this script after you modify it with your own credentials and database information.
If this content did not answer your questions, try searching or contacting our support team for further assistance.