Case Study: Drupal Association achieves 33% faster page loads and instant updates with Fastly

Drupal Association - Customer Case Study

The Drupal Association, the nonprofit that runs Drupal.org and supports the global Drupal community, needed to scale its infrastructure to serve downloads, updates, docs, and news to a worldwide audience. With millions of sites depending on timely releases and unpredictable traffic spikes, the Association’s challenge was to deliver faster page loads and instant, secure updates while reducing load and bandwidth on origin servers.

They moved Drupal.org, Downloads and Updates to Fastly’s Varnish-based CDN, using Custom VCL, Origin Shield, Instant Purge, and streaming logs. The migration (under two weeks) cut page load times by about 33% (homepage from 2.16s to 1.42s), raised cache hit rates from ~70% to over 90%, achieved a 99% hit ratio for updates, reduced origin bandwidth and costs, and enabled instant updates (150 ms) and real-time logging for better analytics.

Drupal Association

Rudy Grigar

Infrastructure Manager