30
Jul 2013
How Fast 404 saves our Drupal 7 site 25% of RAM
admin | 0 Comments

I have recently monitored a client website in Drupal 7. It was spammed by commenting with spam links. Although I deleted about 600M of spam comments, all of them have been crawled and indexed by search engine bots. At the result, there are quite traffic coming to this site looking for non existing content.

At a peak time, the VPS RAM has been used upto its limit of 2 Gigabyte. The website became very slow. Apparently, responding to those removed spamming content (404 - Page not found) has eaten up alot of the server resource. So I need to find a solution to minimize memory usage for those useless requests.

The problem is, Drupal has expensive 404 errors. When serving a 404 page, Drupal stills do a full "bootstrap", loading all modules, settings, querying d...

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7
Apr 2010
How to make custom 403 and 404 page in Drupal
admin | 3 Comments

Drupal has some very good modules to deal with the 403 - 404 error pages. This article is about how to use Drupal modules to customize 403 and 404 pages.

Error page does not have to look plain and aweful

Why should we bother? Among pages of a website, the 403 (access denied) and 404 (page not found) error page seems to have least attention. However, it comes a little bit annoying for users to see an unwelcome page. I found frustrating when doing google for some keywords, clicked to a link but ended up with a page not found. Some times it's caused by system changes or article archiving. But for any reason, this could cause users to leave the site immediately.

Here are some solutions which Drupal provides...

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