Apache Bench (ab) is a tool that comes with the commonly used Apache HTTP server. It is designed to give you an impression of how your current Apache installation performs. It will work for any HTTP server, not just Apache. Apache Bench shows you how many requests per second your server can serve. This metric is in part a measure of how long it takes Drupal (PHP) to process the request and create a response. While there are other things that the HTTP server does too, executing PHP is by far the most expensive when serving Drupal pages.

Therefore, Apache Bench helps profile your PHP code for new features, patches after their application, and PHP libraries used on the site. You can quickly compare before and after metrics as an indicator of the scale of the impact a change has.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn how to run the Apache Bench tool on our local environment
• Learn to interpret the result of the tests

By the end of this tutorial, you should know how to benchmark and profile your local Drupal installation using Apache Bench (ab).

Sites evolve over time. We're constantly adding and removing modules, modifying content, authoring custom plugins, and changing design elements. All of these changes impact our application's performance -- some more so than others. But if you're not measuring it, you can't know when your site inadvertently gets slower or by how much.

If you are responsible for a site's performance, it might be good to look into benchmarking it and establishing a performance budget early on, then monitor it on an ongoing basis. Many tools, paid and free, allow measuring key web performance indicators and backend code and server performance.

One-time measurements can be useful for immediate debugging, or when figuring out if that big new feature is going to have a negative impact on performance. But for long-term projects, it's helpful to have known baseline values and an established performance budget to see whether your performance improves or declines over time with every new feature.

Establishing the baseline (performance budget) and comparing future measurements is called site performance benchmarking.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn the basics concepts of benchmarking
• Learn a benchmarking process and best practices
• List some commonly used tools for benchmarking Drupal

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand the concept of a performance budget, know when to benchmark your site, and list some tools available to help.

Pantheon uses its Object Cache and Global CDN services to help improve the performance of your Drupal sites. Using them requires a few steps to enable the services and configure your Drupal site to use them effectively.

Many performance optimizations are hosting-provider-specific. This tutorial covers some Pantheon-specific methods for increasing your Drupal site's performance. It's only relevant if your site is hosted on Pantheon. For other common providers, and generic performance tuning tips, refer to other tutorials in this course.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn how to configure and use Pantheon's Object Cache to speed up Drupal caching
• Learn about the use case for Pantheon's Advanced Page Cache module
• Install and configure the Advanced Page Cache module for better Drupal caching of sites hosted on Pantheon

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to explain when and why you would want to use Pantheon's Object Cache and Advanced Page Cache modules, and how they can help speed up Drupal sites hosted on Pantheon.

Over the history of the Internet, the single Page Speed metric evolved into various parameters that influence user experience. These metrics are commonly referred to as Core Web Vitals. Together, they paint a comprehensive picture of the performance of your site from an end user's perspective. These metrics are considered by Google and other search engines when assigning SEO scores.

Knowing what these metrics are, and what they are intended to measure, is an important part of creating a performance profile for your site. This knowledge can also help you find solutions for common performance issues.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Define the metrics that make up the Core Web Vitals
• Point to additional resources where you can learn more about each metric

By the end of this tutorial, you should know which performance metrics are considered Core Web Vitals and what aspects of site performance they cover.

The performance optimization settings and modules provided by Drupal core are intended to work for the broadest possible set of use cases. From an administrator's perspective they provide minimal configuration options, and are designed to just work by being enabled. But behind that simplicity are some powerful features that will help speed up any Drupal-powered application.

The core Dynamic Page Cache and Internal Page Cache modules are designed to provide a base cache setup for any site. These modules are responsible for the static page cache, dynamic page cache, and lazy loading optimizations.

For developers, Drupal provides a complete and well-designed Cache API. You can, and should, integrate it into your custom code. This integration includes defining the cacheability of any content your module outputs so that Drupal can be smart about how that affects how and when a page that incorporates the output can be cached -- as well as storing and retrieving the results of complex or long-running operations. The API also helps with setting appropriate HTTP headers for the responses Drupal generates for each request so that the user's browser and other layers in the stack can appropriately cache the output.

The entire system is flexible, and there are many contributed modules that can aid in making the default caching system even faster for specific use cases.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn about the caching-related modules in Drupal core
• Review the Drupal core performance settings and recommended values

By the end of this tutorial you should be familiar with the Drupal core modules responsible for caching, their settings, and recommended values.

There's no magical set of right tools to use to monitor a Drupal site's performance and health. While thinking about performance monitoring, you need to optimize your approach depending on the number of applications you manage, their complexity, business needs, and the skill-set of your team. Based on these factors, you may choose to use one of the core or contributed modules, go with third-party solutions and services, or some combination of both.

Drupal core comes with a couple of modules that allow you to monitor the health and performance of the site including Syslog, Database Logging, and the status reports provided by the System module. There are also numerous community-contributed modules, a sampling of which we'll cover here.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• List some contributed modules that are commonly used for monitoring a Drupal site
• Provide an overview of what each module does

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list a few contributed modules that might be useful for monitoring your Drupal application and define what each one does.

New Relic is a monitoring service that provides insights into your application stack from front-end performance to the server and infrastructure metrics. New Relic uses a combination of aggregating server logs, and pre-built (or custom) monitors to track the metrics that are most important to your application. The collected data can be organized into custom dashboards, and alerts can be set up and issued per customizable conditions.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn about different New Relic modules and their purpose
• Review some default dashboard components and reports
• Discuss how to use the information in New Relic to understand the health of your Drupal application

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand the basics of using New Relic and the insights it offers to monitor and improve the performance of your Drupal site.

Performance profiling allows you to see an overview of how your Drupal application stacks up against your users' needs and business requirements. A good profile will help you understand where the performance bottlenecks are and where you should focus your efforts in order to achieve the best results when optimizing your application.

There are many profiling tools available to help you analyze your Drupal site's performance. Some are free -- like the browser’s built-in development tools, the Lighthouse Chrome extension, and XHProf. Some are paid -- like New Relic, Blackfire, and other profiling SaaS solutions.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Outline the general concepts and goals of performance profiling
• List some available profiling tools and their features

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to describe what performance profiling is, and list the tools commonly used to establish a performance profile for a Drupal site.

When your site is experiencing performance issues, one way to pinpoint the cause is to use profiling tools. Before you can fix the issue you have to be able to identify what's causing it. All profiling tools do roughly the same thing: they tell you what code is called during the request and how much time is spent executing it. This helps to identify the slowest code and dig deeper into the cause. Once the cause is determined you can start figuring out how to optimize the code.

For this tutorial, we’ll use New Relic as a profiling tool, but you can apply a similar methodology using the profiling tool of your choice.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn how to identify and analyze slow transactions
• Look at common things to check for while profiling
• Cover some questions you should ask when looking at profiling data to help track down the slow code

By the end of this tutorial, you should know how to profile a Drupal site (specifically with New Relic) to find performance bottlenecks.

No one likes to wait for a slow site to load. Not me, not you, and definitely not search engines. And the effect of site load times on things like SEO, user bounce rates, purchase intent, and overall satisfaction are only going to become more pronounced over time.

Drupal is a modern web framework that is capable of serving millions of users. But every site is unique, and while Drupal tries hard to be fast out of the box, you'll need to develop a performance profile, caching strategy, and scaling plan that are specific to your use case in order to be truly blazing fast.

Drupal site performance depends on multiple components, from hardware setup and caching system configuration to contributed modules, front-end page weight, and CDNs. Experienced Drupal developers looking to optimize their applications know where to start looking for potential savings. They can manipulate settings and combinations of these components to achieve the desired results. Our goal with this set of tutorials is to help explain the process and provide you with the insight that comes with experience.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Introduce high-level performance concepts for Drupal that we'll then cover in more detail elsewhere
• Provide an overview of the main Drupal performance components.

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand what components around your Drupal application are responsible for site performance.

There’s no one-size-fits-all path to upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11, but there is a set of common tasks that everyone will need to complete.

In this tutorial we’ll:

• Explain the differences between Drupal 10 and Drupal 11 that affect the upgrade path.
• Walk through the high-level steps required to upgrade from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11.
• Provide resources to help you create an upgrade checklist and start checking items off the list.

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to:

• Explain the major differences between Drupal 10 and 11.
• Audit your existing Drupal 10 projects for Drupal 11 readiness, and estimate the level of effort involved.
• Start the process of upgrading your site from Drupal 10 to Drupal 11.

Drupal recipes provide a new way to package and share reusable features across Drupal sites. Unlike traditional install profiles or distributions, recipes are applied once to add functionality and then step out of the way, leaving you with a standard Drupal site that you can customize freely.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what Drupal recipes are and how they differ from install profiles and distributions
• Learn the four core properties that make recipes powerful: applied (not installed), shareable, non-locking, and composable
• Explore real-world scenarios where recipes solve common platform and agency challenges

By the end of this tutorial you'll be able to explain what Drupal recipes are, identify features in your projects that are good candidates for recipes, and articulate the value of recipes to stakeholders.

Recipes transform your Drupal site by adding features and configuration. After downloading (or authoring) a recipe it needs to be applied to your Drupal project. This is analogous to following the step-by-step instructions in a recipe to make a dish. Only, we're not performing the steps on our own, but instead we're using Drupal's tools to apply the recipe. Applying the recipe adds its features to your Drupal project. This requires establishing safe workflows to apply recipes, verify their effects, and roll back changes if needed.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Apply a recipe in a non-production environment using a feature branch workflow.
• Review configuration changes using Git and verify functionality in the UI.
• Understand how to roll back recipe changes if needed.
• Learn safe workflows for both developers and non-developers.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to safely apply recipes to your projects, review their impact, and decide whether to keep or roll back the changes.

The built-in config actions in Drupal core cover most common scenarios. But sometimes you need custom operations specific to your feature or the configuration your module relies on. You can create custom config actions by defining them as plugins or by adding PHP attributes to a configuration entity class's methods. Let's implement a custom config action to toggle an SEO strict mode setting to learn how to extend recipes with domain-specific configuration operations and make them reusable across your projects.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Identify scenarios where custom config actions are warranted.
• Understand the two implementation patterns: plugins and attributed methods.
• Implement a custom config action in a module.

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to implement custom config actions that extend the configuration API provided to your recipes, making platform-specific operations reusable and declarative.

The Configuration Actions API lets recipes modify existing configuration rather than just adding new configuration. By extending the SEO Article recipe created in a previous tutorial with config actions, you'll learn how to manipulate existing configuration objects in order to do things like grant permissions and modify entity display modes. This is necessary because sometimes a recipe needs to modify configuration that already exists on the site, not just add new configuration.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Add config actions to grant permissions to existing roles
• Modify entity displays using config actions
• Reapply recipes and observe idempotent behavior
• Experiment with new content types to understand recipe limitations

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to use common config actions in your recipes and understand how recipes behave when reapplied.

The Configuration Actions API is a powerful feature of Drupal recipes that allows you to modify existing configuration without replacing it entirely. While configuration exports let you add new configuration, config actions let you update what's already there—like granting permissions to an existing role or adjusting display settings. Effectively, config actions are a way for a recipe to declare a PHP method to run on a configuration object during recipe application and any arguments that method needs to run.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what config actions are
• Learn how to read and write config actions in a recipe's YAML file
• Explore common patterns like granting permissions and modifying displays
• Understand the difference between generic and type-specific actions

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to read config actions in recipes, understand when to use them versus configuration exports, and recognize common config action patterns.

Creating your own recipes lets you package and reuse features across your projects. By building a simple SEO-focused recipe from scratch, you'll learn what goes into a recipe, how to declare dependencies, and how to test your work.

In this tutorial, we will:

• Understand what belongs in a recipe versus what belongs in modules
• Create a recipe structure with proper metadata and dependencies
• Export and package configuration into a recipe
• Test the recipe by applying it to a second site

By the end of this tutorial, you'll be able to create your own recipes, package them properly with dependencies, and apply them to other Drupal sites.