The other day I heard about Cache Router, a newish module for Drupal that allows multiple ways to cache content in a more scalable manor than the default Drupal caching. Since the Memcache module has been lagging behind for Drupal 6, I decided to give the new module a whirl on Developer Karama (using the Memcache method).

Before Cacherouter: Concurrency Level: 5 Time taken for tests: 2.927986 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 997 (Connect: 0, Length: 997, Exceptions: 0) Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 7490366 bytes HTML transferred: 6904166 bytes Requests per second: 341.53 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 14.640 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 2.928 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 2497.96 [Kbytes/sec] received After Cacherouter: Concurrency Level: 5 Time taken for tests: 0.828379 seconds Complete requests: 1000 Failed requests: 0 Write errors: 0 Total transferred: 7330000 bytes HTML transferred: 6900000 bytes Requests per second: 1207.18 [#/sec] (mean) Time per request: 4.142 [ms] (mean) Time per request: 0.828 [ms] (mean, across all concurrent requests) Transfer rate: 8640.97 [Kbytes/sec] received Those are some pretty impressive numbers for just dropping in a module and modifying my settings.php (the Drupal 6 version of the module doesn't require any patches to core, the Drupal 5 version does). If you don't know what the numbers above mean, don't worry, just know it enabled my little VPS to serve about four times the requests per second and shaved off about 10ms per page request. Also, you don't have to run a Memcache server to take advantage of this module. It has multiple engines to enable caching behind the scenes. tl;dr version: If you run Drupal 6, install this module, it will speed up your site for little to no work on your part.