One of the issues I had with the South Bay Bible Fellowship Drupal installation was that when I initially installed the software, the page loads were unbearably slow. At this point in time we are on a shared server that is not optimized for Drupal. The page loads were so slow that it was clear that many visitors would give up and move on.
In addition to administrative users, we use the authenticated user feature to prevent spammers from posting comments to Pastor’s blog. Other than that, our users generally are viewing as anonymous users. After much research, I decided to implement caching, and added the module fastpath_fscache. According to the Drupal site: “This approach is generally faster since the web server doesn’t need to initialize a database connection and crunch through a bunch of PHP files for an anonymous user hit.” It also indicates that this is a development module. However, I had experimented with a number of other modules and, due to the version of PHP our server provides (4.4.0), I had to give this one a try. I have been using it for a month and have had no issues. However, I recommend that if a developer can use a more stable caching module, such as Boost, she should.
At the same time, I wanted new content to be immediately available to new anonymous users, and not have to wait for a cache expiration. So I found instructions on using rules and PHP to refresh changed pages in cache. I set up a rule “Content is going to be saved” and using PHP instructions had Drupal run cron when that trigger occurs. Whenever new content is saved, cron is run, and a new page is generated immediately in the cache. If there are no changes, the cache doesn’t need to be refreshed.
The result has been that page loads for anonymous users are as quick as the original HTML web pages had loaded. The cache is recreated when required and not at only after a specific cache expiration period.
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