Testing

Testing Boost Caching on a Drupal Site

Minu.podipara | | 2 min read

Boost is a Drupal module that accelerates the performance of a site by efficient caching of pages. It can be enabled for all pages other than the ones which need to show constantly updating data (for example, a captcha box).
NOTE: If you are looking on how to install and configure Boost for your Drupal website, go here: How to install and configure Boost caching module to speed up performance on your Drupal 6 site.

Here we list some methods for testing the Boost implementation on a Drupal website:

1. In the Admin Panel

  • Take Admin > Site Building > Modules > List and check whether the ‘Boost’ Module under ‘Caching’ is enabled.
  • Take Admin > Reports > Status Reports and Check for the following status message:
    Boost | Boost installed correctly, should be working if properly configured.

2. In the User Page

  • Take the view source of every pages of your Drupal site and verify whether the line 
    <!-- Page cached by Boost @ 2012-08-04 12:33:19, expires @ 2012-08-11 12:33:19 -->

    has been added. You can test this by simply pressing Ctrl + U (works on most browsers), or by right-clicking on the page and select ‘View Page Source’.

3. In the CPanel

Now, log into Cpanel and check whether Drupal website pages are being cached in the ‘cache’ folder in the root directory.

  • Check whether different html pages that are being cached under,
    /Cache/normal/sitename/sitepage/node
  • Check whether different pages created using drupal modules are being cached under,
    /Cache/normal/sitename/site page
  • Check whether different css or Js files are being cached under, 
    /cache/perm/sitename/sitepage/files/css
/cache/perm/sitename/sitepage/files/jss

Now use some performance analysis tool (FireBug has some inbuilt features that can help you with this) to check for page load times. If Boost has been enabled the pages will sure load faster. :-)

 

 

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