Boost
Boost provides static page caching for Drupal enabling a very significant performance and scalability boost for sites that receive mostly anonymous traffic. Boost is very easy to install and has been throughly tested on Shared, VPS and Dedicated hosting. Apache is fully supported, with Nginx, Lighttpd and IIS 7 semi-supported. It supports caching & gzip compression of html, xml, ajax, css, & javascript. It's cache expiration logic is one of the best ones out there; it's fairly simple to have different cache lifetimes for different parts of your site. The built in crawler makes sure expired content is quickly regenerated for fast page loading. For shared hosting this is your best option in terms of improving performance.
If you opt to use Nginx, Boost is your best option for high performance by about 5% in comparison to Varnish, Boost delivers 3.4k requests per second in a test: Nginx+Boost beats Varnish. In a second test Boost hits 4.1k requests per second a 9% improvement over the competition.
Testimonials
For an introduction, read the original blog post. More technical details are available in Justin Miller's write-up. Also be sure to read the up to date presentation on the 6.x branch of Boost.
Read how Development Seed used Boost to help the United Nations campaign StandAgainstPoverty.org set a world record in organizing the biggest mass mobilization on a single issue, with over 116 million people (almost 2% of the world's population) participating:
- 2008/10/22 United Nations uses Drupal for huge anti-poverty event by Ian Cairns
- 2008/10/23 Improving Drupal's performance with the Boost module for the UN's Millennium Campaign by Ian Ward
Install
Be sure to read the accompanying README.txt for installation and usage instructions. This is an advanced module and takes some extra effort to get it working correctly.
Recommended modules
- Global Redirect - Remove trailing / from url
- Pathauto & Transliteration - Remove spaces & other non RFC2396 characters from the url
- Anything else that helps with SEO, as duplicate URL's means more pages to cache.
Credits
4.7 Originally developed by Arto Bendiken
5.x Port by Alexander I. Grafov.
5.x Developed & Maintained by no one at this time. #454652: Looking for a co-maintainer - 5.x
6.x Port by Ben Lavender.
6.x Developed & Maintained by Mike Carper. I do accept Donations.
The following people currently have CVS access: Arto Bendiken, Moshe Weitzman, Barry Jaspan, Justin Miller, Ben Lavender, Josh Koenig, Ian Ward and Mike Carper.
List Of Other Caching Modules
http://groups.drupal.org/node/21897
http://drupal.org/node/326504
Releases
| Official releases | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6.x-1.14 | 2009-Nov-03 | 93.2 KB | Download · Release notes | Recommended for 6.x |  |
| 5.x-1.0 | 2007-Sep-30 | 21.1 KB | Download · Release notes | Recommended for 5.x | |
| Development snapshots | Date | Size | Links | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 6.x-1.x-dev | 2009-Nov-07 | 94.47 KB | Download · Release notes | Development snapshot |  |
| 5.x-1.x-dev | 2009-Jan-10 | 24.98 KB | Download · Release notes | Development snapshot | |
