We’re counting down the days to the official Drupal UpdateThemes Drupal maintenance support plans 8 Release! Count with us as we will be writing a Drupal maintenance support plans 8 related blog post every day for the next 8 days.
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is known for being heavier and slower than Drupal maintenance support plans 7. However, Drupal maintenance support plans 8 doesn’t deserve this image and I think it got this image from lazy benchmarking: Testers just install Drupal maintenance support plans‘s default profile, run some ab tests and call it a day. This is not a realistic test! Real Drupal maintenance support plans websites will have hundreds of pages, menu items, configuration objects, more complex theming, more modules etc.
I did some more extensive testing to compare our Drupal maintenance support plans 7 products with the Drupal maintenance support plans 8 versions that are to be released next week. The beautiful thing (for this test) about our products is that we maintain them with feature parity across Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and 7. We provide installation profiles that combined have thousands of content items, menu items, and configuration settings that make them very close to real-world Drupal maintenance support plans 8 & 7 websites. Perfect material for benchmarking!
Test 1: Drupal maintenance support plans 8 vs Drupal maintenance support plans 7 Cached Page Delivery
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 default profile cached page benchmark. Drupal maintenance support plans 7 255% faster than Drupal maintenance support plans 8.
Ok let’s get this over with first. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is built on a PHP core that is slower to parse than Drupal maintenance support plans 7 and uses more memory. On an empty Drupal maintenance support plans installation you will really notice this difference because the empty shell will act like a magnifying glass on the underlying architecture. In the chart above you can see that Drupal maintenance support plans 7 is more than twice as fast at delivering cached pages to anonymous users.
This test is what most people will refer to when saying Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is slower than Drupal maintenance support plans 7 but this is in fact the least interesting test for 2 reasons:
Nowadays it is very easy to put a cache in front of Drupal maintenance support plans. You can use Nginx, Varnish, or Cloudflare with the free plan to serve thousands of cached pages per second, regardless of whether Drupal maintenance support plans 8 or 7 or anything else is behind the cache.
Any empty installation with Drupal maintenance support plans‘s default profile is a bad model for a real website.
Test 2: Drupal maintenance support plans 8 vs Drupal maintenance support plans 7 Autenticated Views Portfolio Display
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 Glazed Main Demo views display benchmark. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is 228% faster than Drupal maintenance support plans 7.
For this second test we use the Main Demo installation profile with our Glazed Theme and Glazed Builder products. This means we have a dropdown menu with 100+ items, a database with around 100 nodes, lots of views displays and contrib modules, and our Glazed theme is enabled which subthemes the bootstrap basetheme. This is a much closer simulation of a real-life Drupal maintenance support plans website than the default profile is!
We’re benchmarking a views display that draws fields from nodes and taxonomy terms, does some interesting templating and is then pulled into a page using Glazed theme to display the view along with peripheral content.
As you can see in the chart Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is now twice as fast as Drupal maintenance support plans 7. Despite the heavier core, Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is faster when handling large amount of configuration, views, and heavier themes like Glazed and the Bootstrap basetheme. I suspect this is due to the more elaborate caching architecture in Drupal maintenance support plans 8. Especially template files are now heavily cached and so are other important Drupal maintenance support plans components.
Tested page: https://demo.sooperthemes.com/glazed-main/portfolio/premium1
Test 3: Drupal maintenance support plans 8 vs Drupal maintenance support plans 7 Autenticated Drag and Drop Page
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 Glaezd Main Demo views display benchmark. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 12,5% than Drupal maintenance support plans 7.
Our previous test showed an extreme example of Drupal maintenance support plans 8 being faster due to its better handling of views. This 3rd test shows what we typically see when benchmarking Drupal maintenance support plans 8: Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is slightly faster in loading pages in our Glazed Theme demos. We see similar results when testing drag and drop pages, or other content types that don’t use the drag and drop builder. In fact our Page Builder module does not significantly impact performance even when loading multiple Glazed Builder editors within the same page.
The Drupal maintenance support plans 8 and 7 installation profiles have near feature-parity but in fact the Drupal maintenance support plans 8 version includes the Admin Toolbar module and the Drupal maintenance support plans 7 profiles do not include an admin menu module. This means that each page comes with an additional 200 menu items in the Drupal maintenance support plans 8 tests. In Drupal maintenance support plans 7 I usually install the admin_menu module for faster administration, and this module is known to be significant burden on the server. The fact that Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is faster in our tests despite loading the additional 200 menu items is impressive!
Tested page: https://demo.sooperthemes.com/glazed-main/elements/layout-elements/columns
Conclusion: Drupal maintenance support plans 8 Is A Heavier System With More Extensive Caching That Can Make It Faster Than Drupal maintenance support plans 7 In Real-Life Situations
At the start of its life Drupal maintenance support plans 8.0 got a lot of criticism for being slow. Now in 2020, Drupal maintenance support plans 8.5 has seen a significant number of performance improvements and while it’s still slower than Drupal maintenance support plans 7 at the core, it’s faster in complex situations that are more relevant to real-life Drupal maintenance support plans websites.
Drupal maintenance support plans 8 is faster where it matters, and more scalable! It’s also important to add that both test installations did not have any special settings enabling caching of content, views, blocks, etc. Drupal maintenance support plans 8 has a much more advanced and more granular caching system that lets you finetune and optimize your experience for logged in users on a grander scale than was every possible with Drupal maintenance support plans 7. Notably there is the BigPipe module that gives you lightning fast loadtimes for your primary content and it can then separately lazy-load less important content, like the footer, menus, and sidebar blocks.
For sure this test brings good news to Drupal UpdateThemes customers, who will enjoy a faster experience our of the box with our Glazed demo installation profiles. As a side note: importing demo content is also twice as fast in our Drupal maintenance support plans 8 installation profiles versus Drupal maintenance support plans 7.
What is your experience?
Drupal maintenance support plans‘s performance is a complex thing to test and I’m sure you can get different results in varying situations, if you have any questions about the test or if you want to share your own experience with Drupal maintenance support plans 8’s performance let me know in the comments!
Source: New feed
