5 steps to speed up the backend

[kexej28769@nongnue]

Quick technical background: Our website is built on top of the Drupal CMS and we are running on a server with a LAMP stack (plus Varnish and MemCache). If you are not using MySQL, however, the steps and principles in this article are still relevant for other databases or reverse proxies.

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Before we jump into specific steps that can help you speed up your backend, it might help to review what we mean by “backend.” You can think of the backend as everything that goes into storing data, including the database itself and the servers -- basically anything that helps a website work that you don’t visually interact with. For more information on the difference between backend vs. frontend, you can read this article .

Step 1: Make sure you have a reverse proxy configured.
This is an important first step. For Wall Street Oasis (WSO), we use a reverse proxy called Varnish. It is by far the most important and fastest layer of caching and serves the majority of anonymous traffic (visitors logged out). Varnish stores the entire page in memory, so it is very fast to return to visitors.