It's been awhile since I have talked tech on my blog. So, today I decided to give a quick tip to speed up drupal since several of my readers run their own blogs with drupal.
Drupal has a caching system. What this caching system does is take a page, such as your homepage, and stores the html that makes us that page in the database. Then when an anonymous visitor comes to your site, rather then recreate the page with all it's database queries and calculation, the page the visitor sees is pulled from the cache with one quick database query.
The page loads really really fast for an anonymous user and when a user is logged in they still can see all of their customizations. And, when a page is updated with comments or changes to the page the cache is updated, too.
To enable caching go to /admin/settings on your site. Then, under the heading 'Cache settings' choose enabled. If you are running a smaller site you should be able to run the site with 'Minimum cache lifetime' set to none.
There are many tweaks and modules meant to speed up drupal and even more in the upcoming version but this is one of the basics and it works like a charm.
