Using Fast 404 to improve Drupal performance

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    Issue

    Drupal's 404 response is very resource intensive as it causes Drupal to fully bootstrap.

    Resolution

    Enabling Fast 404 in Drupal core

    Drupal core has an option to serve a simple static HTML error response to a 404 status code. Enabling this setting can decrease wasted bandwidth and server load.

    The instructions differ for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. Follow the instructions that correspond to the Drupal version in use in your application.

    Drupal 8
     

    1. Edit your website's settings.php file
    2. Find and uncomment (remove the #) the following lines: 
      # $config['system.performance']['fast_404']['exclude_paths'] = '/\/(?:styles)|(?:system\/files)\//'; 
# $config['system.performance']['fast_404']['paths'] = '/\.(?:txt|png|gif|jpe?g|css|js|ico|swf|flv|cgi|bat|pl|dll|exe|asp)$/i';
# $config['system.performance']['fast_404']['html'] = '<!DOCTYPE html><html><head><title>404 Not Found</title></head><body><h1>Not Found</h1><p>The requested URL "@path" was not found on this server.</p></body></html>';
    3. Save the settings.php file
    4. Commit the changed code to your repository

    Drupal 7

    1. Edit your website's settings.php file
    2. Find and uncomment (remove the #) on the following line: 
      # drupal_fast_404();
    3. Save the settings.php file
    4. Commit the changed code to your repository

    Using the Fast 404 module

    Drupal core's fast 404 option avoids expensive page rendering without the need for an additional module. However, the Fast 404 module improves on this core functionality with more options to reduce load caused by bad requests.

    The instructions differ for Drupal 7 and Drupal 8. Follow the instructions that correspond to the Drupal version in use in your application.

    Drupal 8

    1. Add the module to your composer.json file. To do so, open a command prompt window, go to the top level in your Drupal 8 directory (the directory that contains the composer.json file) and run these commands: 
      composer config repositories.drupal composer https://packages.drupal.org/8
composer require drupal/fast_404
    2. Place the code at the bottom of the README.TXT file into your settings.php file
    3. If the module was not installed in /modules, modify the include_once path to match the install location
    4. Commit the module and modified settings.php file to your repository
    5. Enable the module on the modules page

    Drupal 7

    1. Add the module to your standard modules location (usually sites/all/modules)
    2. Place the code at the bottom of the README.TXT file into your settings.php file
    3. If the module was not installed in sites/all/modules, modify the include_once path to match the install location
    4. Commit the module and modified settings.php file to your repository
    5. Enable the module on the modules page

    To maximize the effectiveness of the Fast 404 module it may be necessary to familiarize yourself with each configuration setting found within the code block of the README.TXT file to determine whether it fits your needs.

    Cause

    By default, Drupal fully bootstraps for every 404 Not Found. This can be very expensive resource intensive; not just for missing pages, but any page with a bad link or a missing files can generate several 404s with one page request which can multiply the amount of resources needed to serve a single page.

    Ideally, it would be best to eliminate all 404 requests; however, there are times when this is not a tenable option, such as developer resource constraints or a traffic spike. Thankfully, there are several methods to eliminate a fully bootstrapped response to a 404 Not Found request.

     

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