Drupal core is built with performance and scalability in mind. It is Fast by Default. But performance is often a by-product of your specific application, and depending on how you're using Drupal, you can further optimize your site using contributed modules. These modules range from debugging utilities to cache-related modules.

It's worthwhile to have a general idea of what's available in the contributed module space. And, when you need to address your site's unique performance needs, it helps if you already know about existing solutions.

In this tutorial we'll:

• Look at a few popular contributed modules that improve Drupal's performance
• Learn about the benefits these modules may provide to your site
• Provide tips on how to configure these modules

By the end of this tutorial you should be able to list some popular performance related Drupal modules and describe their use case.

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.

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.