Optimizing your Drupal site and its database

If your website has a moderate to large number of visitors, you should tune your website for maximum performance. This will ensure that all your visitors have a positive experience, and are not frustrated by delays in loading pages or accessing the website.

We will discuss ways to optimize both the backend database, and the frontend of the website that displays the information to the visitor.

Optimizing the database tables

In this section we'll optimize our MySQL database tables using the DB Maintenance module.

Goal

Optimize the database where your site content is stored, to ensure the best possible performance.

Additional modules needed

DB Maintenance (http://drupal.org/project/db_maintenance)

Steps

When a database is used as frequently as the Drupal database is, it can become less optimized over time, because having a large number of records inserted and deleted from each table can result in the database having wasted space. All databases will allow...