Review: Drupal 6 Performance Tips by Trevor James and T J Holowaychuk

Its hard to teach performance. There is so much to know before you can even consider making performance enhancements. This book makes no exception of that. It spends the first three chapters showing the reader, 'the ropes' of Drupal. 

Therefore it took me a while to get to the good stuff, the performance enhancements I could make to Drupal to make my site go faster!

Now when we're talking performance there are several areas that we can look up to improve performance. I would imagine this would be a good way to explain performance - look at each area and describe why there are performance hits and how we can make them better. Its a kind of "Teach a man to fish" ideology. This book, however,  has more of a "Give a man a fish" philosophy. It is full of information about modules that can do caching things for you. Most of the chapters spend there time explaining how to get, install and configure these modules. It also comes with recommendations of which modules work well together and which settings to use or not use.

Based on the fact that a lot of this book is a 'how-to' to configuring modules and Drupal, I'd say this book is targeted at DYI developers or someone who hasn't done performance optimization before. However in saying that, I had never actually used ANY of the modules mentioned in the book. So, I decided to see how easy it was and improved my performance on geek.joshwaihi.com by enabling the Boost module and the Global Redirect module which is a good idea since I'm the only authenticated user on my site - everyone else is anonymous - They'll always see the same content.

The process was fairly painless, it only took me about 10 minutes to download, install and configure a decent performance increase.

Nevertheless, while there are some rather simple things like that, I think some reader will have trouble rapping there heads around optimizations like using Memcache let alone figuring out if its working or improving your site.

There was one thing about this book that I was rather disappointed about, and that was its lack of diversity. It assumed that I was using Windows, a web environment installer like WAMP which mean't I was running MySQL. What about people who use real environments? like Ubuntu? what if I have shell access to my webroot? what about PostgreSQL? This is only more encouraging that this book isn't for DYI type development.

This book is decent length and describes somethings in a lot of detail. Adding support for other environments and databases would have made it a lot harder to find the good bits you wanted to know about. I see the trade off. As a professional Drupal/PostgreSQL developer however, I found about 40% of this book to be useful to me. I'd expect 70% of it will be useful to MySQL pro users and 70% of it to be useful for DYI developers.

You can buy Drupal 6 Performance Tips from Packt.