We cannot recommend this Drupal module highly enough.
It is an excellent addition to any Drupal hosting UK service, whether you are suffering from poor performance or not.
Boost can speed up anonymous browsing of your Drupal site by inordinate proportions.
How does Boost work?
Boost works for all anonymous requests to your Drupal website.
An anonymous request is one where the user is not logged into the Drupal system.
When enabled, Boost will create a static on-disk cache of each PHP-rendered page within your site as an HTML GZipped page.
When a user comes along to your site and requests a page, Boost will first check if the page exists within the cache.
If the page is found in the cache, Boost will deliver the cached HTML page instead of generating the page via the PHP interpreter.
In order to ensure that pages aren't cached for too long, Boost allows you to set a default, site-wide expiration setting for all cached assets.
By default, this is set to 1 hour, which is fine for websites that experience a fair amount of traffic, but for websites that don't get much traffic, we recommend increasing the expiration setting accordingly.
The cache expirations are checked on each cron run, so it's important that your hosting supplier supports cron, which we do here at Farbyte.
What's the advantage of using Boost in Drupal?
With Boost installed, your website doesn't need to ask your web server to perform PHP interpretation of the Drupal content and subsequent database access, thus saving on CPU, disk and RAM resources.
The web server simply delivers the HTML page from the cache, which in most cases will increase the performance of your website significantly.
At Farbyte, we recommend any customer that is using our Drupal hosting to take advantage of this excellent module and install Boost.
