CivicActions Outlines Caching and Load-Testing Strategies for Drupal Website Performance

Managing sustained traffic growth is the focus of a new article by Daniel Mundra, associate director of Drupal at CivicActions. The post continues an earlier discussion on bot identification and mitigation, shifting attention to infrastructure and operational measures used to keep a government Drupal website responsive under higher request volumes. Daniel says the organisation established performance baselines through monitoring dashboards as services were migrated from legacy systems to Drupal.

The article identifies caching as a primary mechanism for reducing load on Drupal. CivicActions increased page cache duration from 30 minutes to one hour after improving automated cache-clearing processes. The implementation combines Drupal caching with Amazon CloudFront caching, while automated purging removes outdated content when editors publish updates. Daniel also describes the use of CloudFront Origin Shield and collaboration with AWS engineers to improve cache availability across edge locations, reducing the number of requests that reach Drupal directly.

The post also discusses load testing as a way to identify infrastructure bottlenecks. CivicActions used the open-source tool Locust to test how components, including Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service, Amazon Relational Database Service, search infrastructure, storage, and networking resources behaved under increased demand. The testing showed that a search appliance reached connection limits before Drupal or the database infrastructure reached performance constraints. The article concludes with areas for further work, including stricter query parameter handling, more static content delivery, and continued load testing to identify performance limits.