Drupal 6 and the Cache Static Module

One of the sites that I run (http://lordsoftyr.com) has been getting hammered lately. It was a real mess. I use Dreamhost to host all of my sites. They were good price wise and their support wiki and their techn support are really great. My site was taking up 90% of the shared server resources that I was on. Drupal was dying on about 70% of all the pages because the server just could not keep up. I had already slowed down the search engines with robots.txt and by telling google to crawl at the slowest possible speed. But none of that helped. It was time to move to a virtual server.

Dreamhost's PS server is priced based on memory usage. So it is vital to keep your usage at the minimum possible level. Drupal has some built in caching, but it is only really useful for anonymous users and even then, its still hitting the database for stuff. I decided to check out some of the caching modules available for Drupal. There are a number of modules, but none of them seemed as read for production usage as cachestatic-6.x-1.2-beta1. It requires some changes to your .htaccess file in the mod_rewrite section. Simple stuff reallly. Dreamhost has a monitoring page for your private server (PS). The first week they let you use all the memory you want so you can "right size" your server memory usage. I let the server run until the afternoon and then installed Cache Static. I pretty much just took all the defaults for this module.

After I installed it at around 12pm, I let it run the rest of the day and then looked at the results the next morning. You can see the dramatic difference. Using Cache Static reduced my memory usage by almost 50%. That is a huge difference! Especially when I get charged based on memory usage. This caching module has literally reduced my bill in half.

I would recommend this product to everyone using Drupal. Even if you aren't getting hammered. If you are on a shared server it will significantly reduce your memory and cpu footprint and it will also make your site seem lightening fast in comparison.