Move RSS-feeds out of Drupal

• Published:December 4th, 2012
• Category:Drupal, php, RSS, XHProf, XML

Our main RSS-feed at DeWereldMorgen.be is the most requested page next to our homepage.

It seems logic, think of how many rss-readers hourly check the feed. And, think of how many cpu and RAM that consumes, certainly with a fat system like Drupal.

An RSS-feed is easy to make in PHP. All you need is one custom query and a decent library like the Universal Feed Generator to generate the XML.

Create stripped version of Drupal setup

I used the minimal code that is needed to work in the Drupal framework. So I made a blank php-file in my www-root with this code:

require_once './includes/bootstrap.inc';
drupal_bootstrap(DRUPAL_BOOTSTRAP_FULL);

This code has the security and functions of Drupal, but without the menu’s, theme’s, and a lot of module hooks. You don’t need a menu or a theme to create an RSS-feed, do you?

So I created my RSS-feed with just this in my php-file:

• the drupal_bootstrap function
• the Universal Feed Generator library included
• one query with db_query()

With cache

Let’s see performance wise. This is the report of a feed generated based on a user’s blog and articles. Memcache was not cleared before execution. Stats are generated with XHProf.

Performance wise, my solution is twice as fast.

Without cache

These stats are generated when caches were cleared.

9x as fast. 7x less queries.

Of course, this is just for the first run, but still.

More soon. Please discuss this idea.