I’m happy to announce that Fabian Franz and I managed to get a first release of BigPipe published today, coinciding with the Drupal 8.0.0 release!

Rather than explaining what it does, see for yourself:

(That’s with 2 slow blocks that take 3 s to render. Only one is cacheable. Hence the page load takes ~6 s with cold caches, ~3 s with warm caches.)

Go download BigPipe 8.x-1.0-beta1!1

Fastest Drupal yet!

After Drupal 8 already shipping with both the Page Cache and Dynamic Page Cache enabled by default earlier, this is the third and final step in our quest to make the entire web fast.

• Fast anonymous user page loads: Page Cache — entire page is cached.
• Fast authenticated user page loads: BigPipe — majority of page including main content is cached (thanks to Dynamic Page Cache) and sent first, the rest is rendered later and streamed.

Go and enjoy the fastest Drupal yet!2

P.S.: none of this would have been possible without my employer Acquia, whom sponsored both my time and Fabian’s to make BigPipe a reality.

1. We were able to release it today because the code was ready: it was developed over the course of several months in a Drupal core issue and “just” moved into a module, with every commit matching a comment in the issue, to make it easier to understand how the code base got to this point. ↩︎

2. And please report any issues you encounter at d.o/project/issues/big_pipe — depending on how well BigPipe works in the real world during Drupal 8.0.x, we should be able to get it into Drupal 8.1.x core! ↩︎

• Drupal
• Acquia
• performance