How to Improve Drupal’s Performance Using Boost Module

I’ve been struggling for so many days on how I can improve the performance issues on this website. The traffic has increased so badly that I am afraid of violating again the rules implemented by HostGator. Until recently I research on what is the best module that can speed up and minimize the resource usage on my website.

Well there are so many modules that can do this. This can be found at http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897.

The focus of this article is to explain how I get boost module worked on my website. At first glance, I am confident that I can run this module without any difficulties. But that is not the case. There are a lot of factors I need to consider and I will explain it here one by one.

1. I installed boost together with other module that is recommended by boost. Those are Global Redirect, Pathauto (which I already have), Transliteration, and Poormanscron.
2. Read the README.txt.
3. Tweak some settings found at Installation & Settings.

After following all of these instructions I still cannot get boost running without a “Page not found” error. What I did is of course find some help at Drupal’s forum and I even ask some few question. While waiting for the answer I also visited my Web Host customer live support.

After asking several questions on HostGator technical support they said that gzip compression is not supported on a shared hosting. They only support it on VPS and dedicated server.

By knowing this I quickly disabled Gzip page compression (Boost & Core). After that I’m still having problem with Page not found error. But thanks to the technical support team of HostGator. The guy found out that there is a problem with the file and folder permission. He immediately fixed it and when I test my website and view the html source I finally see the following line at the end of the page:

<!-- Page cached by Boost @ 2009-10-21 23:21:18, expires @ 2009-10-22 00:21:18 -->

But the trouble doesn’t stop there. On the other day I tested several page and I still receive a Page not found error on some of the article. What I did is “Reset boost database” to empty all the cache. After this…the site is now serving without this error.

Things to do in order to run boost properly:

1. Install boost together with other module that is recommended by boost. Those are Global Redirect, Pathauto, Transliteration, and Poormanscron.
2. Read the README.txt.
3. Follow the instruction for the best settings at Installation & Settings.
4. Ask your web hosting if they support boost module.

Additionally I would like to recommend HostGator due to their great support that I cannot found at other web hosting.