I am looking for confirmations from other Drupal developers regarding details and corroborations. Comments are welcome here. PHBs need not worry, your Drupal site is just fine.
This post is about an inherent problem with Google’s recently announced “Speed-as-a-ranking-feature” and its problems with content-management systems like Drupal and Wordpress. For an auto-generated website, Google is often the first and only visitor to a lot of pages. Since Drupal spends a lot of time in the first render of the page, Google will likely see this delay. This is both due to a problem with how Drupal generates pages, and Google’s metric.
Google recently announced that as a part of it’s quest to making the web a faster place, it will penalize slow websites in its ranking:
today we’re including a new signal in our search ranking algorithms: site speed. Site speed reflects how quickly a website responds to web requests.
Since Google’s nice enough to provide webmaster tools, I looked up how my site was doing, and got this disappointing set of numbers:
I’m aware 3 seconds is too long. Other Drupal folks have reported ~600ms averages. My current site does under 1s second on average based on my measurements. This is probably because I occasionally have some funky experiments going on in some parts of the site that run expensive queries. Still, some other results were surprising:
Investigating further, it looks like there are 3 problems:
DNS issues & Multiple CSS: Since Google Analytics is on a large number of websites, so I’m expecting their DNS to be prefetched. CSS is not an issue since the 2 files are client media specific(print / screen).
GZip Compression: Now this is very odd. I’m pretty sure I have gzip compression enabled in Drupal (Admin > Performance > Compression). Why is Google reporting lack of compression? To check, I ran some tests, and discovered that since Google usually sees the page before it’s cached, it’s getting a non-gzipped version. This happens due to the way Drupal’s cache behaves, and is fixable. Ordinarily, this is a small problem, since uncached pages are rendered for only the first visitor. But since Google is the first visitor to a majority of the pages in a less popular site, it thinks the entire site is uncompressed. I’ve started a bug report for the uncached page gzip problem.
A flawed metric: The other problem is that Drupal (and Wordpress etc) use a fry model ; pages are generated on the fly per request. On the other hand, Movable Type, etc., bake their pages beforehand, so anything served up doesn’t go through the CMS. Caching in fry-based systems is typically done on the first-render, i.e. the first visit to a page is generated from scratch and written to the database/filesystem, any successive visitor to that page will see a render from the cache.
Since the Googlebot is usually the first (and only) visitor to many pages in a small site, the average crawl would hit a large number of pages where Drupal is writing things to cache for the next visitor. This means every page Googlebot visits costs a write to the database. While afaik Drupal runs page_set_cache after rendering the entire page and hence the user experience is snappy, I’m assuming Google counts time to connection close and not the closing </html> tag, resulting in a bad rendering time evaluation.
This means that Google’s Site Speed is not representative of the average user(i.e. second, third, fourth etc visitors that read from the cache), it only represents the absolute worst case situation for the website, which is hardly a fair metric. (Note that this is based on my speculation of what Site Speed means, based on the existing documentation.)
What other people have to say:
On the plus side, maybe this means that TechCrunch will disappear from the Google SERPs altogether!
I use this cron script to pre-load the cache to solve this problem.
#!/bin/bash
cd /home/guts/bin/no-delete-this-crawling-tmp/
delay=1
tmp=“downloads”
sites=“example.com test.example.com”
log=“log.txt”
for site in $sites
do
#run cron
/usr/bin/wget \
—output-document=- \
—quiet \
—tries=1 \
http://$site/cron.php
sleep $delay
#crawl the site to juice cache, but do it slowly to not overload the server
/usr/bin/wget \
—recursive \
—wait=$delay \
—domains=$site \
—level=inf \
—directory-prefix=$tmp \
—force-directories \
—delete-after \
—output-file=$log \
—no-verbose \
http://$site/
rm -rf $tmp
done
exit
Interesting stuff. One question. Why do you assume that Googlebot is always the first user to a page? Don’t they constantly re-crawl all the pages, and may be they average or some other weighting to determine the page’s true access speed?
Doesn’t the Boost module cover this with it’s own cron based crawler? Just curious to see what other peoples thoughts are?
Actually it’s not looking at the time to retrieve the HTML document, it’s looking at total render time. So the time that it gives is the time till window.ready I believe.
Yes boost does have a multi-threaded crawler. You can also use a recursive wget call if you don’t want to use boost. Something like this
wget -r -nd -l20 --delete-after http://www.example.com/
Yes, it’s the window.ready time. Thus I don’t think Drupal improvement helps much. A few hundreds of ms on server side don’t count as much as a banner.
Google says only less than 1% of search results are affected. I consider it means 1% slowest sites are penalized. 3 sec are okey, my site are 10 sec (95% slower than others, 1000 point test). I have 18 sec for the most visited page (about 2000 pageviews/day, it said, well cached by boost) because it has too many comments. So, server side optimization is nearly useless. I’ve just use a smaller comment pagination and wait…
@Hung now if it only weren’t linked to by thousands of twitter bots (humans or otherwise).
@Pradeep: Bots read many pages humans never search for, like my 2003 post about college life etc. Crawlers tend to crawl new pages aggressively (based on new links found etc.) and recrawl infrequently, in the order of once in months. Caches may expire before that (due to LRU cache size, cache pruning policy etc).
John,mikeytown2 and @Jamie, thanks for pointers to the boost module and recursive wget idea. Precaching is good idea and maybe this should go into Drupal core, i.e. trigger precaching for all pages created due to any content change (Movable Type used to do that). However, with automatic metadata(Calais) and vocabulary tags / terms in Drupal, even a small site will have a huge number of facets to view the same content, and hence could have hundreds of thousands of “pages”, which may be undesirable for webhosts with small databases.dalin andjcisio: According to SearchEngineLand , their metric depends on 2 factors:I don’t expect Googlebot to do a full page render for all my pages. There are some anecdotal reports of Googlebot-side JS execution for a fraction of pages, but not a full render.
For the second, load time assumes your site is frequented by people with Google Toolbar, which is fairly low for my site to get any reliable numbers (which they admit in their Webmaster Tools report).
Regardless, it turns out that database writes(cache population) are slow enough(~100s of ms) on my server to be considered significant, compared to render time(~1000ms).
@jsisio: Since your render time is >10s, I can see why server-side optimization doesn’t matter in your case. Also, given that you have precaching already implemented, and you’ve already performed the optimization we’re worrying about! :) Would love to see what your server-side numbers look like without boost.
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