performance

Setting up a Pi Hole for whole-home ad/tracker blocking

Pi Hole - Admin DNS query request dashboard page in Safari

Pi Hole is a nifty open source project that allows you to offload the task of blocking advertisements and annoying (and often malicious) trackers to a Raspberry Pi. The installation is deceptively simple (a curl | bash affair), but I wanted to document how I set up mine headless (just plugging the Pi into power and the network).

Set up Raspbian Lite

I bought a Raspberry Pi model 2 B along with the official Raspberry Pi foundation Case. Then I bought a Samsung Evo+ 32GB microSD card (which comes with a full-size SD card adapter), and did the following steps on my MacBook Pro to set up the Pi's OS:

Profiling Drupal 8 Sites in Drupal VM with XHProf and Tideways

XHProf, a PHP extension formerly created and maintained by Facebook, has for many years been the de-facto standard in profiling Drupal's PHP code and performance issues. Unfortunately, as Facebook has matured and shifted resources, the XHProf extension maintenance tailed off around the time of the PHP 7.0 era, and now that we're hitting PHP 7.1, even some sparsely-maintained forks are difficult (if not impossible) to get running with newer versions of PHP.

Enter Tideways.

Tideways has basically taken on the XHProf extension, updated it for modern PHP versions, but also re-branded it to be named 'Tideways' instead of 'XHProf'. This has created a little confusion, since Tideways also offers a branded and proprietary service for aggregating and displaying profiling information through Tideways.io. But you can use Tideways completely independent from Tideways.io, as a drop-in replacement for XHProf. And you can even browse profiling results using the same old XHProf UI!

Changing the font for one character in a string on a Drupal site

File this under the "it's a very bad idea, but sometimes absolutely necessary" category: I was working on a site that wanted to use a particular font for headlines throughout the site, but the client detested one particular character (an ampersand), and requested any time that character were to occur in the page title, it would be swapped out for a different font.

If at all possible, you should avoid doing what I'm about to describe—but in the off chance you need to have an automated way to scan a string of text and change the font family for one particular character, this is what to do:

First, you need to create a special CSS class that you can apply to the individual character, so in your theme's CSS, add something like:

Poor Man's XHProf profiling of Drupal 8 Migrations and Drush commands

On a recent project, there was a Migration run that took a very long time, and I couldn't pinpoint why; there were multiple migrations, and none of the others took very long at all (usually processing at least hundreds if not thousands of nodes per minute). In Drupal 7, if you enabled the XHProf module, then you'd get a checkbox on the configuration page that would turn on profiling for all page requests and Drush commands.

In Drupal 8, the XHProf module was completely rewritten, and as a side effect, the Drush/CLI profiling functionality is not yet present (see: Profile drush/CLI with XHProf in Drupal 8).

Since I don't have the time right now to help figure out how to get things working through the official XHProf module, I decided to use a 'poor man's profiling' method to profile a Migration run:

Fixing ERR_SPDY_INADEQUATE_TRANSPORT_SECURITY SSL error in Chrome

Recently, I was upgrading the infrastructure for Hosted Apache Solr, and as part of the upgrade, I jumped from Nginx 1.8.x to 1.10.x, which includes HTTP/2 support. I had previously used SPDY support in my server configuration to help the site run better/faster on modern browsers with SPDY support:

server
{
    listen 443 ssl spdy;
    server_name hostedapachesolr.com;
    ...
}

After the server upgrades, I was getting the following error on Nginx restarts:

nginx: [warn] invalid parameter "spdy": ngx_http_spdy_module was superseded by ngx_http_v2_module in /etc/nginx/conf.d/hostedapachesolr.conf:10

So I switched the configuration to use http2 instead of spdy on the listen line, and restarted nginx.

Everything worked great in Safari and FireFox, but when I tried loading the page in Chrome, I was greeted with the following error:

Speeding up Composer-based Drupal installation

Drupal VM is one of the most flexible and powerful local development environments for Drupal, but one the main goals of the project is to build a fully-functional Drupal 8 site quickly and easily without doing much setup work. The ideal would be to install Vagrant, clone or download the project, then run vagrant up. A few minutes later, you'd have a Drupal 8 site ready for hacking on!

In the past, you always had to do a couple extra steps in between, configuring a drupal.make.yml file and a config.yml file. Recently, thanks in huge part to Oskar Schöldström's herculean efforts, we achieved that ideal by switching from defaulting to a Drush make-based workflow to a Composer-based workflow (this will come in the 3.1.0 release, very soon!). But it wasn't without trial and tribulation!

Yes, Drupal 8 is slower than Drupal 7 - here's why

tl;dr: Drupal 8's defaults make most Drupal sites perform faster than equivalent Drupal 7 sites, so be wary of benchmarks which tell you Drupal 7 is faster based solely on installation defaults or raw PHP execution speed. Architectural changes have made Drupal's codebase slightly slower in some ways, but the same changes make the overall experience of using Drupal and browsing a Drupal 8 site much faster.

When some people see reports of Drupal 8 being 'dramatically' slower than Drupal 7, they wonder why, and they also use this performance change as ammunition against some of the major architectural changes that were made during Drupal 8's development cycle.

First, I wanted to give some more concrete data behind why Drupal 8 is slower (specifically, what kinds of things does Drupal 8 do that make it take longer per request than Drupal 7 on an otherwise-identical system), and also why this might or might not make any difference in your choice to upgrade to Drupal 8 sooner rather than later.

Use Drupal 8 Cache Tags with Varnish and Purge

Varnish cache hit in Drupal 8

Over the past few months, I've been reading about BigPipe, Cache Tags, Dynamic Page Cache, and all the other amazing-sounding new features for performance in Drupal 8. I'm working on a blog post that more comprehensively compares and contrasts Drupal 8's performance with Drupal 7, but that's a topic for another day. In this post, I'll focus on cache tags in Drupal 8, and particularly their use with Varnish to make cached content expiration much easier than it ever was in Drupal 7.

How to overclock the microSD card reader on a Raspberry Pi 3

Late last year, I published a blog post with comprehensive benchmarks of various microSD cards used with the internal Raspberry Pi 2 reader, based on the comprehensive (and always-up-to-date Raspberry Pi microSD card benchmark page I maintain for the Pi Dramble project). After publishing the blog post, a few different readers pointed me to some overclocking tweaks that could help boost the speeds further for UHS microSD cards, allowing large file I/O speed to double, and random I/O to get a solid boost as well.

Raspberry Pi microSD card performance comparison - 2015

2018 Update: Please see the latest benchmarks in 2018 using a Raspberry Pi model 3 B+.

Variety of microSD cards tested with the Raspberry Pi model 2 B

This post's benchmarks were performed on a Raspberry Pi 2; for all the latest benchmarks, on Raspberry Pi 3 or later revisions, check out the official Pi Dramble microSD card Benchmarks page.

In my experience, one of the highest-impact upgrades you can perform to increase Raspberry Pi performance is to buy the fastest possible microSD card—especially for applications where you need to do a lot of random reads and writes.