apache

30 January, 2008
table.analysis { min-width: 40em; width: 85%; } table.analysis th { border-bottom: 1px solid #ccc; font-size: 0.92em; } table.analysis tr td:first-child { padding-left: 30px; background-repeat: no-repeat; background-position: 5px 50%; } table.analysis tr { padding-top: 6px; padding-bottom: 6px; } table.analysis tr.bad { background-color: #fcc; color: #200; border-color: #ebb; } table.analysis tr.attention { background-color: #ffd; border-color: #eeb; } table.analysis tr.good { background-color: #dfd; border-color: #beb; } /* table.analysis tr.bad td:first-child { background-image: url(images/articles/analysis-bad.png); } table.analysis tr.attention td:first-child { background-image: url(images/articles/analysis-attention.png); } table.analysis tr.good td:first-child { background-image: url(images/articles/analysis-good.png); } */ table.analysis caption { caption-side: top; text-align: left; font-size: 130%; color: #494949; font-weight: bold; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; } table.analysis caption a:link, table.analysis caption a:visited, table.analysis caption a:active { text-decoration: none; color: #494949; } table.analysis caption a:hover { text-decoration: underline; }

Introduction

Google dominates the search engine market for a large part thanks to its spartan, no-bells-nor-whistles interfaces. But also thanks to its incredible speed (which is partially thanks to that spartan interface, of course).

Since you’re reading this article, you’re probably a Drupal developer. It’s pretty likely that you’ve had some visitors of your Drupal-powered web site complain about slow page load times. It doesn’t matter whether your server(s) are shared, VPSes or even dedicated servers. Visitors that live abroad – i.e. far from where your servers are located – will face the same performance issues, but at even worse scales.
This article is about tackling these issues.