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.

Drupal site performance relies heavily on caching. Optimal caching (and invalidation) requires that each page is rendered with the correct cacheable metadata. This metadata allows for intelligent caching -- but when something isn't working correctly, it can be tricky to figure out where exactly the metadata was generated from.

When debugging Drupal cache issues, you're usually trying to answer 1 of 2 primary questions:

• Why is this cached? If the information gets stale, why isn’t it updated?
• Why is this not cached? And why is our cache hit rate low?

The Drupal cache system consists of many layers, each of which may contribute to the problem. This tutorial focuses on debugging the Drupal application cache layer, and strategies for debugging Varnish. Given that most external to Drupal layers rely on the use of HTTP headers for caching, you should be able to use similar techniques to those used for debugging Varnish.

In this tutorial, we'll:

• Learn strategies for debugging the Drupal application cache and render cache
• Share strategies for debugging low hit rates when using Varnish

By the end of this tutorial, you should know how to enable and use various cache debugging mechanisms in Drupal to help identify problems in your site performance and resolve them.

Server scaling is the process of adding more resources (CPU, memory, disk space, etc.) to a server (or servers) to help with performance. This might be a single server, or a cluster of different machines. When we talk about server scaling, think more about the resources and less about the specific hardware. Modern servers may not always resemble a physical machine that you can open up and insert additional RAM into. But the theory is the same: more memory means the server can handle more concurrent requests.

Sometimes your Drupal site is optimized, but traffic is still high and takes most of the server’s resources. In order to sustain that load you'll need to scale your server up.

Sometimes you don’t have the resources or expertise to implement caching optimizations, refactoring code, and modifying slow queries -- all of which would improve Drupal's performance. In these cases, you may consider server scaling.

Server scaling can be done in two ways: horizontally or vertically.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Learn what server scaling is
• Discuss examples of both horizontal and vertical server scaling
• Talk about when to choose horizontal versus vertical scaling strategies

By the end of this tutorial, you should understand the concept of server scaling and how it applies to a Drupal application.

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.

Installing Drupal using the instructions in this tutorial will give you a working Drupal site that can be used for learning, or real-world project development.

Before you can work on a Drupal site locally (on your computer), you'll need to set up a local development environment. This includes all the system requirements like PHP and a web server, that Drupal needs in order to run. Our favorite way to accomplish this is using DDEV.

In this tutorial we'll learn:

• How to install and configure DDEV for use with a Drupal project.
• How to use DDEV's integrated Composer to download Drupal and Drush.
• How to install Drupal inside DDEV so you can access the site and start doing development.

By the end of this tutorial, you should be able to set up a local development environment for learning Drupal or working on a new Drupal project.