Hi! I’m Wim, live in the beautiful bike-centric city of Ghent and I’ve been fortunate enough to be able to work full time on making Drupal better & faster for over a decade now! (I’m also interested in energy efficiency, smart home shenanigans and think more software empathy would make the world a better place.)

 

19 November, 2015

Drupal 8: BigPipe module ready

I’m happy to announce that Fabian Franz and I managed to get a first release of BigPipe published today, coinciding with the Drupal 8.0.0 release!

Rather than explaining what it does, see for yourself:

(That’s with 2 slow blocks that take 3 s to render. Only one is cacheable. Hence the page load takes ~6 s with cold caches, ~3 s with warm caches.)

Go download BigPipe 8.x-1.0-beta1![^1]

Fastest Drupal yet!

After Drupal 8 already shipping with both the Page Cache and Dynamic Page Cache enabled by default earlier, this is the third and final step in our quest to make the entire web fast.

  • Fast anonymous user page loads: Page Cache — entire page is cached.
  • Fast authenticated user page loads: BigPipe — majority of page including main content is cached (thanks to Dynamic Page Cache) and sent first, the rest is rendered later and streamed.

Go and enjoy the fastest Drupal yet![^2]

19 November, 2015

Drupal 8 release day: docs polished & ready!

Later today, Drupal 8 will be released! At this time, good docs are of course crucial.

As the maintainer and de facto co-maintainer of several Drupal 8 core modules and subsystems, I spent the last several days making sure that the documentation is up-to-date for:

  • the Text Editor module (editor)
  • the CKEditor module (ckeditor)
  • the Quick Edit module (quickedit)
  • the Filter module (filter)
  • the Cache system
  • the Render system (specifically the render caching part)
  • the Asset Library system

The following drupal.org handbook pages have either received minor updates, received complete overhauls or were written from scratch:

12 October, 2015

Drupal 8's Dynamic Page Cache

Drupal 8 now has a Dynamic Page Cache. The Page Cache module only works for anonymous users, the Dynamic Page Cache module takes that a step further: it works for any user.

Since April 8, Drupal 8 had its Page Cache enabled by default. Exactly 5 months later, on September 8, the Dynamic Page Cache1 module was added to Drupal 8, and also enabled by default.

What?

The Page Cache module caches fully rendered HTML responses — it assumes only one variant of each response exists, which is only true for anonymous users2. The innovation in 8 on top of 7’s Page Cache is the addition of cache tags, which allow one to use the Page Cache but still have instantaneous updates: no more stale content.

23 September, 2015

Making Drupal fly — The fastest Drupal ever is here!

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements.

I’ll let the session description speak for itself:

With placeholders (https://www.drupal.org/node/2478483) having just gone into Drupal 8 Core, BigPipe being unblocked now and actively making its way in, Render Strategies around the corner, and out-of-the-box auth-caching in CDNs + Varnish a true possibility on the horizon, those are really exciting times for Drupal 8 Performance. But there is even more …

Come and join us for a wild ride into the depths of Render Caching and how it enables Drupal to be faster than ever.

The Masterplan of Drupal Performance (Next steps)

Here we will reveal the next steps of the TRUE MASTERPLAN of Drupal Performance. The plan we have secretly (not really!) been implementing for years and are now “sharing” finally with all of you! (Well you could look at the issue queue too or this public google doc, but this session will be more fun!)

Learn what we have in store for the future and what has changed since we last talked about this topic in Los Angeles and Amsterdam and why Drupal 8 will even be more awesome than what you have seen so far.

Also see a prototype of render_cache using the exact same Drupal 8 code within Drupal 7 and empowering you to do some of this in Drupal 7 as well.

Get the edge advantage of knowing more

Learn how to utilize cache contexts to vary the content of your site, cache tags to know perfectly when items are expired and cache keys to identify the objects - and what is the difference between them.

Learn how powerful ‘#lazy_builders’ will allow the perfect ESI caching you always wanted and how it will all be very transparent and how you can make your modules ready for the placeholder future.

See with your own eyes how you can utilize all of that functionality now on your Drupal 7 and 8 sites.

Get ready for a new area of performance

We will show you:

  • How to take advantage of #lazy_builders
  • How to tweak the auto-placeholdering strategies (depending on state of issue at time of session)
  • The biggest Do’s and Don’ts when creating render-cache enabled modules and sites
  • Common scenarios and how to solve them (mobile sites variation, cookie variation, etc.)
  • Drupal using an intelligent BigPipe approach (but a different one, one that is way more like Facebook does it …)

Get to know the presenters

This session will be presented by Wim Leers and Fabian Franz. Wim implemented a lot of what we show here in Drupal 8 and made the APIs easy and simple to use and made cache tags and #lazy_builders a very powerful concept. Fabian has prototyped a lot of this concepts in his render_cache module, introduced powerful Drupal 8 concepts into Drupal 7 and is always one step ahead in making the next big thing. Together they have set out on a crusade to rule the Drupal Performance world to bring you the fastest Drupal ever and with that trying to make the whole Web fast!

Frequently Asked Questions

  • I have already seen the session in Amsterdam and Los Angeles, will I learn something new?

Yes, absolutely. While the previous sessions focused more on the basics, this session will also cover how to use #lazy_builders and custom render strategies to empower your Drupal to be fast.

  • Will there again be a demo?

Yes, there will again be a nice demo :). You’ll love it!

  • Is it even possible to make it even faster than what we have seen?

Yes :)

See https://events.drupal.org/barcelona2015/sessions/making-drupal-fly-fastest-drupal-ever-here.

Conference
DrupalCon Barcelona
Date
Location
Barcelona
Video
Making Drupal fly — The fastest Drupal ever is here!
Duration
60 minutes
22 September, 2015

Caching at the Edge: CDNs for everyone

Drupal 8 has comprehensive knowledge about the cacheability of the things it renders. This opens new doors. Did you know Drupal 8 will be able to cache everything at the edge?

For sites with many mobile users (high latency due to network), global audiences (high latency due to distance) and performance-sensitive sites (e-commerce), Drupal 8 will be a huge leap forward.

We’ll be showing how easy and powerful it is using the CloudFlare and Fastly CDNs.

Cache tags

Instantaneous purging of all (and only!) the affected pages when an article is updated. No more manual purging by content editors. No more fiddling with URLs to purge. It all just works. Optimally.

Cache anonymous pages without any effort. On your own reverse proxy, and on many CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

This sounds nice, but that’s just the anonymous user case. What about authenticated users?

Cache contexts

The typical example: a shopping site, users categorized in groups according to interests, and a shopping cart.

Automatic caching of the entire page, minus the shopping cart, on the edge. Reused across all users in the same group. And, if the CDN supports it, even the shopping cart can be cached on the edge (and be kept up-to-date thanks to cache tags). Otherwise only thatneeds to talk to the origin (via AJAX, for example).

Cache authenticated pages without any effort.  On your own reverse proxy, and on some CDNs — thanks to standardized configuration.

Goals

  • The caching concepts
  • Demos
  • BigPipe, ESI, hybrid rendering strategies
  • A peek at the future: ServiceWorker

See https://events.drupal.org/barcelona2015/sessions/caching-edge-cdns-everyone.

Conference
DrupalCon Barcelona
Date
Location
Barcelona
Video
Caching at the Edge: CDNs for everyone
Duration
60 minutes
21 June, 2015

Eaton & Urbina: structured, intelligent and adaptive content

While walking, I started listening to Jeff Eaton’s Insert Content Here podcast, episode 25: Noz Urbina Explains Adaptive Content. People must’ve looked strangely at me because I was smiling and nodding — still walking :) Thanks Jeff & Noz!

Jeff Eaton explained how the web world looks at and defines the term WYSIWYG. Turns out that in the semi-structured, non-web world that Noz comes from, WYSIWYG has a totally different interpretation. And they ended renaming it to what it really was: WYSIWOO.

Jeff also asked Noz what “adaptive content” is exactly. Adaptive content is a more specialized/advanced form of structured content, and in fact “structured content”, “intelligent content” and “adaptive content” form a hierarchy:

13 May, 2015

Making Drupal fly — The fastest Drupal ever is near!

Update September 24, 2015: the fastest Drupal ever is no longer near, it is here!

Together with Fabian Franz from Tag1 Consulting, I had a session about Big Pipe in Drupal 8, as well as related performance/cacheability improvements. Fabian’s demo of BigPipe and other render strategies in the first ten minutes are especially worth watching :)

I’ll let Fabian’s session description speak for itself:

Come and join us for a wild ride into the depths of Render Caching and how it enables Drupal to be faster than ever.

The Masterplan of Drupal Performance

Here we will reveal the TRUE MASTERPLAN of Drupal Performance. The plan we have secretly (not really!) been implementing for years and are now “sharing” finally with all of you! (Well you could look at the issue queue too or this public google doc, but this session will be more fun!)

Learn what we have in store for the future and what has changed since we last talked about this topic in Amsterdam and why Drupal 8 will even be more awesome and why you don’t have to wait and can do it all in Drupal 7 right now with the help of the render_cache module (with some extra work).

Get the edge advantage of knowing more

Learn how to utilize cache contexts to vary the content of your site, cache tags to know perfectly when items are expired and cache keys to identify the objects - and what is the difference between them.

Learn how powerful ‘placeholders’ will allow the perfect ESI caching you always wanted and how it will all be very transparent and how you can make your modules ready for the placeholder future.

See with your own eyes how you can utilize all of that functionality now on your Drupal 7 and 8 sites.

Get ready for a new area of performance

We will show you:

  • The biggest Do’s and Don’ts when creating render-cache enabled modules and sites
  • Frontend performance pitfalls and why front-end performance is tied to backend performance more than you thought
  • Why libraries[] are so great and why single CSS/JS files make trouble.
  • Common scenarios and how to solve them (mobile sites variation, cookie variation, etc.)
  • Drupal using an intelligent BigPipe approach

Get to know the presenters

This session will be presented by Wim Leers and Fabian Franz. Wim implemented a lot of what we show here in Drupal 8 and made the APIs easy and simple to use and made cache tags and #post_render_cache a very powerful concept. Fabian has prototyped a lot of this concepts in his render_cache module, introduced powerful Drupal 8 concepts into Drupal 7 and is always one step ahead in making the next big thing. Together they have set out on a crusade to rule the Drupal Performance world to bring you the faster Drupal ever!

See https://events.drupal.org/losangeles2015/sessions/making-drupal-fly-fastest-drupal-ever-near.

Conference
DrupalCon Los Angeles
Date
Location
Los Angeles
Video
Making Drupal fly — The fastest Drupal ever is near!
Duration
60 minutes
9 April, 2015

Drupal 8 now has page caching enabled by default

After more than a year and probably hundreds of patches, yesterday it finally happened! As of 13:11:56 CET, April 8, 2015, Drupal 8 officially has page caching enabled by default![^1] And not the same page caching as in Drupal 7: this page cache is instantly updated when something is changed.

The hundreds of patches can be summarized very simply: cache tags, cache tags, cache tags. Slightly less simple: cacheability metadata is of vital importance in Drupal 8. Without it, we’d have to do the same as in Drupal 7: whenever content is created or a comment is posted, clear the entire page cache. Yes, that is as bad as it sounds! But without that metadata, it simply isn’t possible to do better.1

I’ve been working on this near-full time since the end of 2013 thanks to Acquia, but obviously I didn’t do this alone — so enormous thanks to all of you who helped!

This is arguably the biggest step yet to make Drupal Fast By Default. I hate slow sites with a passion, so you can probably see why I personally see this as a big victory :)

7 April, 2015

renderviz: tool visualizing Drupal 8's render tree

I’m working on making Drupal 8 faster as part of my job at Acquia. The focus has been on render caching12, which implies that cacheability metadata is of vital importance in Drupal 8.

To be able to render cache all things that can possibly be render cached, Drupal 8 code must:

  • set the right cache max-age — to ensure only the cacheable parts of the page are cached
  • set the right cache contexts — to ensure content is varied as expected (per language, per role, per timezone, per user â€Š)
  • set the right cache tags — to ensure rendered content is invalidated when the data it depends on is modified

Before Drupal 8, approximately zero attention was given to cacheability of the rendered content: everything seen on a Drupal 7 page is rendered dynamically, with only the occasional exception.

By flipping that around, we make developers more conscious about the output they’re generating, and how much time it takes to generate that output. This in turn allows Drupal 8 to automatically apply powerful performance optimizations, such as: