Wim Leers Freelance Drupal Developer

This weekend on Sunday, February 7, we'll have a full day of Drupal talks at the 10th edition of FOSDEM, Europe's biggest, free-est and open-est software conference.

FOSDEM, is a free and non-commercial event organized by the community, for the community. Its goal is to provide Free and Open Source developers a place to meet. The Drupal project was granted a developer room at FOSDEM to do exactly that: to share knowledge about Drupal.

The presentations schedule for the Drupal devroom features interesting speakers such as Robert Douglass, Károly Négyesi, Roel de Meester and Kristof van Tomme and even more interesting subjects as mobile device design, AHAH, eID and Views 3. Everyone is invited to attend the presentations.

I will be talking about page loading performance once again. My presentation will be similar to the one I gave at DrupalCon Paris 2009, but extended with the goals for CDN integration module 2.0 and a look forward of what I'll work on for my master thesis.
Last but most definitely not least, Joeri Poesen will show off the File Conveyor set-up he uses for a powerful integration with a CDN (which was written as part of my bachelor thesis).

This is the brief version of my actual master thesis proposal, which is attached in PDF format.

Introduction

My bachelor thesis was about making Drupal web sites load faster. 80 to 90% of the response time (as observed by the end user) is spent on downloading the components of a web page. Therefor this is also the part where optimizations have the largest effect.

To be able to prove the positive impact of optimizing the loading of the components of a web site — thereby proving that the work I was going to have done had a positive impact — I researched existing page loading profiling tools. Episodes (which refers to the various episodes in the page loading sequence) came out as a clear winner.

Also as part of my bachelor thesis, I wrote a simple Drupal module — the Episodes module — that could create simple charts to compare the average page loading time per day per geographic region.

I will be presenting together with Konstantin Käfer on Front End Performance. To be more exact, he will be talking about Front End Performance in general, and I will be talking about a subdomain of that: CDN integration.
Our sessions were merged because they overlapped to some extent — so now there's just one supercharged session instead! It's scheduled for Thursday (3 September), at 9 AM, in the La Reserre (translated: coal-shed) room.

In specific, I will be talking about the work I've been doing as part of my bachelor thesis. Integrating Drupal with a CDN was quite painful previously, but by using the CDN integration module, you can choose for either:

• extremely easy CDN integration;
• easy, but extremely flexible CDN integration by also using the “File Conveyor” daemon that I wrote

In this very brief article, I highlight the key properties of CDNs: what differentiates them and which technical implications you should keep in mind.

A content delivery network (CDN) is a collection of web servers distributed across multiple locations to deliver content more efficiently to users. The server selected for delivering content to a specific user is typically based on a measure of network proximity.

It is extremely hard to decide which CDN to use. In fact, by just looking at a CDN's performance, it is close to impossible (see “Content Owners Struggling To Compare One CDN To Another” and “How Is CDNs Network Performance For Streaming Measured?”)!

In this article, I explain what was required to integrate the Episodes page loading performance monitoring system with Drupal.
Episodes was written by Steve Souders, whom is well-known for his research on high performance web sites and has authored multiple books on this subject.

The work I am doing as part of bachelor thesis on improving Drupal's page loading performance should be practical, not theoretical. It should have a real-world impact.

To ensure that that also happens, I wrote the Episodes module. This module integrates the Episodes framework for timing web pages (see the “Episodes” section in my “Page loading profiling tools” article) with Drupal on several levels – all without modifying Drupal core: