Drupal 8 and NGINX

Maximizing Drupal 8 Performance with NGINXWednesday, 20 January 2016

MORE INFORMATION AT NGINX.COM

Your Questions

1. Who are we?● Floyd Smith, Technical Marketing Writer. Author of NGINX blog post, “8 Tips for

Drupal 8 Performance”. ● Faisal Memon, Product Marketer

2. What’s new in Drupal 8?

3. How can I implement a high-performance site?

4. How do NGINX and NGINX Plus fit into my efforts?


Agenda

● What’s New in Drupal 8● Planning Site Architecture● Replacing Your Web Server● Drupal Specifics - Drupal 8 Configuration● Caching - Why cache with NGINX? - Microcaching - Cache Purging with NGINX Plus● Reverse Proxy Server - Load Balancing - Session Persistence - Bonus: SSL/TLS and HTTP/2● Questions?


What’s New in Drupal 8

1. Mobile improvements. Full support for mobile site templates and easy backend administration from a mobile device.

2. Data and presentation layer uncoupling. The Drupal API is now fully RESTful, making it easier to use with Angular.js, Ember.js, and other client-side content extraction and display tools.

3. Support for Symfony2. Symfony 2 is an up-to-date, object-oriented PHP framework, well known for customer relationship management (CRM) integration.

4. Twig support. Twig is a frontend library and template engine that eliminates some disadvantages of pure PHP while embracing the latest PHP standards.

5. Security improvements. New features offer additional ways to make systems more secure.


Agenda

● What’s New in Drupal 8● Planning Site Architecture● Replacing Your Web Server● Drupal Specifics- Drupal 8 Configuration● Caching - Why cache with NGINX? - Microcaching - Cache Purging with NGINX Plus● Reverse Proxy Server - Load Balancing - Session Persistence - Bonus: SSL/TLS and HTTP/2● Questions?


Planning Your Site Architecture1. Current architecture. Evaluate your current site traffic and performance.

2. Goals. Immediate problems, future growth

3. Estimate impact of changes. Open source NGINX or NGINX Plus as web server, reverse proxy server, load balancer, more.

4. Plan for growth. Estimate likely and possible growth and speed of growth.

5. Factor in the cloud. Use cloud from scratch, expand into the cloud, move into the cloud.


Agenda



Replacing Your Web Server1. Replace Apache with NGINX or NGINX Plus. Immediate performance fix.

Enables caching for static and dynamic content. (More on this soon.) Does not enable multiple app servers.

2. More performance on same hardware. Event loop replaces thread-per-connection, solves C10K problem.

3. Requires new server configuration. Replace familiar Apache configuration with tighter, more efficient (IMHO) NGINX configuration.

4. Independent of NGINX as reverse proxy server. You can use NGINX as a reverse proxy server with or without using NGINX as your web server; very flexible.


Agenda



NGINX configuration for Drupal• Minor changes to nginx.conf for Drupal 8

• Mostly related to update.php front controller

• Sample configuration available on NGINX wiki• https://www.nginx.com/resources/wiki/start/topics/recipes/drupal/


Change #1: Accommodating update.php front controller

location ~ '\.php$ { ...}

location ~ '\.php$|^/update.php' { ...}

• To accommodate URIs such as: /update.php/selection

• Without this change NGINX will return a 404 error

• Less strict (and more future proof) alternative:

• Will match (and break) legacy Drupal URIs such as /blog/index.php/legacy

location ~ '\.php$(/|$) {


Change #2: Non-greedy match

fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+\.php)(.*)$; fastcgi_split_path_info ^(.+?\.php)(|/.*)$;

• To accommodate URIs such as: /core/authorize.php/core/authorize.php

• Without this change NGINX will return a 404 error

• Greedy match (left side) means entire URI will be SCRIPT_FILENAME

• Non-greedy match (right side) means first authorize.php will be matched


Change #3: Default location

location / { try_files $uri @rewrite;}

location /{ try_files $uri /index.php?$query_string;}

• Change was made for Drupal 7

• Older version can cause query string to be altered


Agenda

● What’s New in Drupal 8● Planning Site Architecture● Replacing Your Web Server● Drupal Specifics - Drupal 8 Configuration● Caching - Why cache with NGINX? - Microcaching - Cache Purging with NGINX Plus● Reverse Proxy Server - Load Balancing - Session Persistence - Bonus: SSL/TLS and HTTP/2● Conclusion● Questions?


Why Cache with NGINX?

Source: http://bbc.in/1O8qHbi

http://bbc.in/1O8qHbi


Microcaching with NGINX

• Cache content for a short time, as little as 1 second

• Site content is out of date for max 1 second

• Significant performance gains even for that short of a time


Microcaching with NGINX

proxy_cache_path /tmp/cache keys_zone=cache:10m levels=1:2 inactive=600s max_size=100m;

server { proxy_cache cache; proxy_cache_valid 200 1s; ... }

• Cache 200 responses for 1 second


Optimized Microcaching with NGINX

server { proxy_cache cache; proxy_cache_valid 200 1s; proxy_cache_lock on; proxy_cache_use_stale updating; ... }

• proxy_cache_lock – If multiple simultaneous requests for the same uncached or stale content, only one request allowed through. Other is queued.

• proxy_cache_use_stale – Serve stale content when while cached entry is being updated


Cache Purging with NGINX Plus

proxy_cache_path /tmp/cache keys_zone=mycache:10m levels=1:2 inactive=60s; map $request_method $purge_method { PURGE 1; default 0; }

server { proxy_cache mycache; proxy_cache_purge $purge_method; }

$ curl -X PURGE -D – "http://www.example.com/*"HTTP/1.1 204 No Content…


Agenda



Load Balancing with NGINX


Session Persistence with NGINX Plus

• Stick client to the same server for duration of a session

• Multiple methods:• NGINX tracks application session cookie: PHPSESSIONID• NGINX inserts its own cookie• Stick Route: Persistence based on cookie, HTTP header, etc.• IP Hash (Available in Open Source)

• Session Draining: Gracefully remove servers from the load balancing pool


SSL offloading with NGINX


HTTP/2 with NGINX

NGINX translates HTTP/2 to the language your application speaks


Agenda


Technology

Drupal 8 and NGINX