Launch Check - Drupal Performance and Configuration Analysis

Pantheon provides static site analysis as a service for Drupal sites to make best practice recommendations on site configurations. These reports are found in the Site Dashboard under the Status tab and are accessible by site team members.

Every site is unique, with its own individual configuration, content, audience, and so forth. On Pantheon, they're all built with one of two CMS frameworks, Drupal or WordPress, and have the same architectural requirements. Therefore, it's possible to provide recommendations that fit the vast majority of use cases using a technique known as static program analysis by gathering performance and behavior patterns to see how a site works.

This mechanism does not actually perform requests on your site, and in doing so avoids the observer effect. It's non-intrusive, so no installation or configuration is required. Finally, it's completely automated for consistent reports and results.

In short, you get a fast, repeatable report that can help detect common problems and provide insights into your site.

What Does Launch Check Evaluate?

Cache Settings

Launch Check evaluates Drupal caching settings for optimal settings that will leverage both internal and reverse proxy caches.

Modules

Launch Check looks at modules, including duplicate modules in the codebase, missing modules which damage performance, development modules in live environments, and unrecommended modules with compatibility problems.

View Display Caching

Launch Check looks at caching for each view display, both result and query caching.

Watchdog Logs

Watchdog logs are evaluated, including overall count, 404 entries, and PHP errors.

Status Report

Launch Check evaluates the Drupal site status report.

Users

Launch Check looks at at users, including reports on number of users, roles, etc.

Database

Launch Check displays database stats such as the number of rows in the options table, options being auto-loaded, tables using InnoDB storage engine (suggests a query to run if not), transients, and expired transients.

Follow the resolution steps below if you have a high number of options being autoloaded, and receive the following message in the database stats: consider autoloading only necessary options.

1. Navigate to the module root folder.

2. Open example.info.yml > example.services.yml > src/ > EventSubscriber > ConfigExample.php.

3. Locate the getSubscribedEvents() function.

   This is the only member function required by the EventSubscriberInterface.

4. Enter the code below to run onSave() whenever a configuration is saved.

   <?php
   public static function getSubscribedEvents() {
   $events[ConfigEvents::SAVE][] = ['onSave'];
   return $events;
   }
   ?>

   Using the onSave() callback invalidates the cache when the appropriate configuration keys change. For example, if system.theme or system.theme.global change, the code will call the appropriate function to invalidate the cache:

   <?php
   public function onSave(ConfigCrudEvent $event) {
   if (in_array($event->getConfig()->getName(), ['system.theme', 'system.theme.global'], TRUE)) 
   }
   ?>

For more resources on troubleshooting autoloaded data in Drupal, see Hard Things Are Possible: Configuration Management in Drupal

What Doesn't Launch Check Address?

• DOM and frontend performance - browsers and aggregating tools such as New Relic® Performance Monitoring are in a much better position to analyze and report
• Usability and site experience - in part, subjective and highly individualized to the site, not really something that can be quantified
• Aesthetics - similarly, way out of scope
• Content - can count the quantity and size, but we leave the actual content to the stakeholders

How Does it Work?

To generate the reports, Pantheon uses Site Audit, an open-source collection of Drush commands. Site Audit is developed and maintained by Pantheon, but is not limited to the Pantheon platform. Any Pantheon specific support is wrapped in a vendor option.

Run Site Audit Manually

You can execute a full report encoded in JSON format to your terminal using Terminus:

{promptUser: user}
terminus remote:drush <site>.<env> -- aa --skip=insights --detail --vendor=pantheon

Frequently Asked Questions

Why does site audit have more reports than what's shown in the Dashboard?

The Dashboard integration is intended to provide developers with the most actionable items; some reports are purely informational and have been omitted. Additionally, some reports are more system intensive, so it makes more sense to allow them to be run on-demand, rather than automatically.

Can I opt out of a specific recommendation?

If you want to permanently opt out of a check, you can set configuration options in settings.php. Individual check names can be specified with a combination of the report name and check name. Note that the configuration array is $conf in Drupal.

Examples

Drupal — permanently opt out of the PageCompression check in the Cache report:

$conf['site_audit']['opt_out']['CachePageCompression'] = TRUE;

The specific key you'll use in the $conf or $config array is a combination of the report and the check. You can find a list of checks for the report here: Site Audit Checks D7 | Site Audit Checks D8.

Keep in mind that the site audit is executed via Drush so it's best to use the $_ENV superglobal for doing things like limiting the exclusions to one environment.

I want to contribute/I found a mistake. How should I proceed?

Use the Site Audit Issue Queue to add and request features, or to report inaccuracies.

Troubleshooting

Site Audit Isn't Running on My Site

If your site's Launch Check is showing recent update information about Database or Redis usage, but older information for the Site Audit checks, and clicking "run the checks now" doesn't update the status, there may be an application error interrupting its complete operation. In order to debug what might be causing an error, you can run the Terminus command to execute Site Audit directly on your Pantheon site:

terminus drush <site>.<env> -- aa --skip=insights --detail --vendor=pantheon --strict=0

If Site Audit isn't running, there may be a fatal PHP error in your application; debugging these problems are crucial for your site's continuing operation and performance.

See Also

If you have a WordPress site, see Launch Check - WordPress Performance and Configuration Analysis.