Drupal is a great CMS but it's a bit top-heavy. I don't know how it compares to other CMS's but from my experience it can really push your CPU and memory usage. When we moved to our dedicated server I thought that the almost daily site-crashes would be a thing of the past, but within weeks of transferring our site as soon as traffic started to increase we ran into trouble.

These are some of the things I learned to minimize CPU and memory usage:

• Activate the Drupal cache: The built-in Drupal cache displays cached pages to anonymous users, saving the overhead of database queries to build every page. Members that are signed-in get uncached pages
  
• Disable un-used modules. Don't just disable them, but remove them from the modules directory completely. Even when the modules are sitting there deactivated, they still consume memory
• Disable the Statistics module: The Drupal statistics module is great. It tracks every pageview and every referrer and is a great way to see what is happening at the site. The only problem is that it tracks every pageview and every referrer - creating a significant load on the CPU - causing a 30%-40% increase in CPU usage during peak traffic. I still turn the statistics module on from time to time, but it's usually off.
• Disable (or don't use) too many filters: I disabled the WordFilter and Smiley's filter. We have three moderators so the WordFilter isn't necessary anymore and we don't need the Smiley filter because TinyMCE has it's own smileys
• Clear the Sessions Table: Once a week I put the site into maintenance-mode and empty the sessions table. If you get a lot of visitors this table can grow quite large. After clearing the sessions table you and everyone else will get logged-out and will be forced to log-in the next time you access the site. In case you forget, the url to log yourself back in is http://yoursite.com/user if you have SE Friendly URLs activated, http://yoursite.com/?q=user if you don't
  
• Clear the Cache: When I clear the sessions table, I also clear the cache. Before doing this, I disable the cache
• Optimize Tables: After clearing the cache and sessions tables I optimize all of the database tables
• Upgrade your RAM: I was forced to upgrade from 1GB to 2GB of server RAM. Prior to the upgrade my memory usage was floating around 75%-90%, and would occasionally hit 100%; swap usage was also very high. After the upgrade to 2GB, memory usage floats around 38%-45% and rarely tops 50%; swap usage is usually now 0%

Labels: Drupal

¶ 9:32 AM