Drupal 8 Request Time - Python

Intro

Drupal 8 is a powerful CMS and web application framework, but analyzing and debugging performance issues can be challenging. One important aspect of performance measurement is request time, i.e., the time it takes for Drupal to process and respond to a request.

In this tutorial, we will explore how to capture request time in Drupal 8 with Python.

Prerequisites

To follow along with this tutorial, you will need:

• A Drupal 8 website, preferably with some traffic or performance issues to analyze
• Python 3.6 or later installed on your local machine
• The requests library installed in Python (pip install requests)

Step 1: Install the Drupal module

To capture request time in Drupal, we need to install a custom module that logs the request time in the Apache access logs. This module can be downloaded from the following URL:

https://github.com/alexpott/drupal8-request-time

Download the ZIP file and extract the contents into the modules directory of your Drupal 8 installation.

Step 2: Enable the Drupal module

In your Drupal 8 website, navigate to Admin > Extend and search for the Request Time module. Check the box next to the module and click the Install button to enable it.

Step 3: Test the Drupal module

To test that the Drupal module is working correctly, access a page on your Drupal 8 website and look for the X-Drupal-Request-Time header in the response. This header should contain the request time in seconds.

Step 4: Capture request time in Python

Now that we have confirmed that the Drupal module is working correctly, we can write a Python script to capture request time for multiple requests to our Drupal 8 website.

Below is an example Python script that sends multiple GET requests to a Drupal 8 website and prints the request time for each request:

import requests

url = 'http://example.com'

for i in range(5):
    response = requests.get(url)
    request_time = response.headers['X-Drupal-Request-Time']
    print(f'Request {i+1} time: {request_time} seconds')

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we learned how to capture request time in Drupal 8 with a custom module and how to retrieve the request time in Python with the requests library. With this information, we can analyze the performance of our Drupal 8 website and identify potential performance issues.