DrupalCon Seattle 2019: Database Query Optimization in Drupal

Drupal has been criticized as "being slow" and, it's true, performance can sometimes be an issue. Some performance improvements are made easily by turning on core caching and leveraging a good hosting platform that provides things like Varnish and Redis support. Once you get through the easier wins, tuning can get more challenging and, often, the issues lie with slow database queries.

In this session, we will cover:

Identifying slow database queries

Manually running queries against a database

Approaches for improving query performance

Testing query changes for improvements

Altering Views and non-Views queries

Attendees will walk away with an understanding of how to find sluggish database queries and ways to make them faster.

Intended Audience

Anyone who develops Drupal sites and wants to make them faster would benefit from this session.

Skill Levels

This session is suitable for intermediate Drupalers as well as for advanced developers who have not done performance tuning for database queries.

About the Speaker

Kristen has been working with Drupal since 2004 as a developer and architect, specializing in multilingual, migrations, architecture, and SEO. She has presented at many DrupalCons, BADCamps, Stanford camps, and other Drupal camps and user group meetings. Check out Kristen's drupal.org page and her Hook 42 team page for more info.

Drupal is a registered trademark of Dries Buytaert.