Drupal

After almost a year since the last master thesis blog post, it’s about time to finally break the silence.

Much has happened since then.

I’ve read a lot for my literature study. It’s quite an adaptation (and a challenge!) to read virtually solely about data mining and statistics. Many of the papers were poorly written (in the typical, extremely awful, overly verbose Academic English). It’s an even larger challenge to actually write about it, in a consistent manner that’s sufficiently formal, yet also understandable.
This is also the reason I haven’t blogged about the progress of my literature study: it is so technical, abstract and complex that it is extremely unlikely that it would have piqued anyone’s interest (although it actually is very cool, sometimes). To be honest, the only thing that kept me going was the anticipation of being able to build something truly useful, possibly game-changing.

Fortunately, on June 24, 2010, 15:00 I successfully defended the literature study of my master thesis, resulting in a score of 16/20!

In this final article in my bachelor thesis series, I explain how I proved that the work I had done for my bachelor thesis (which includes the Episodes module, the Episodes Server module, the CDN integration module and File Conveyor) actually had a positive impact on page loading performance. For that, I converted a fairly high-traffic web site to Drupal, installed File Conveyor to optimize & sync files to both a static file server and an FTP Push CDN, used the CDN integration module to serve files from either the static file server or the FTP Push CDN (the decision to pick either of those two is based on the visitor’s location, i.e. the IP address), measure the results using Episodes and prove the positive impact using Episodes Server’s charts.

Previously in this series:

In this article, I explain the rationale behind the CDN integration module for Drupal 6, which was written as part of my bachelor thesis. It supports integration with both Origin Pull CDNs (out-of-the-box) and Push CDNs (by using File Conveyor).
Note that development of version 2 of this module has already begun! Version two will also be ported to Drupal 7.

Previously in this series:

In this article, which was in fact written in January—February 2008 (well over two years ago), I explain what the benefit is of using a CDN and how the then-new CDN integration module 1.x for Drupal 5 could help you do that for a cheap FTP Push CDN.
This was in fact more of a proof of concept module and therefore this Drupal 5 version of the CDN integration module is no longer supported. This article has been published because it would otherwise only been gathering dust. It will give you a better view on Drupal’s history for supporting CDNs, i.e. how hacky this solution is in comparison with its follower, the CDN integration module for Drupal 6.

In this extensive article, I explain the architecture of the “File Conveyor” daemon that I wrote to detect files immediately (through the file system event monitors on each OS, i.e. inotify on Linux), process them (e.g. recompress images, compress CSS/JS files, transcode videos …) and finally, sync them (FTP, Amazon S3, Amazon CloudFront and Rackspace CloudFiles are supported).

Previously in this series:

• Page loading profiling tools
• Improving Drupal: Episodes integration
• Key Properties of a CDN

So now that we have the tools to accurately (or at least representatively) measure the effects of using a CDN, we still have to start using a CDN. Next, we will examine how a web site can take advantage of a CDN.

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.

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

Introduction {#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 module¹ 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: