We want Drupal 8 to be Fast By Default. As always, one can still be faster, but Drupal 8 takes us huge leaps forward in several aspects: from better front-end performance (CSS & JS aggregation enabled by default; zero JS for anonymous users) which hugely affects performance on mobile devices, to better server-side performance (cache contexts; cache tags; render caching of entities, blocks and even menus!) … and even better… page caching enabled by default!

Better, still: Drupal 8's out-of-the-box performance will continue to improve after the first Drupal 8 release has shipped, thanks to semantic versioning. For now, we need to focus on getting Drupal 8 out. But that doesn't prevent us from adding JS minification in 8.1.0, for example.

However, it doesn't need to stop there! Some performance wins are not a great fit for all sites and hence don't belong in Drupal core. Thanks to architectural improvements in Drupal 8, there's no reason we can't implement something like Facebook's Big Pipe in Drupal 8 contrib for rendering complex sites with highly dynamic or personalized content. Or breaking the 1000 ms barrier on mobile devices by inlining critical content, because Drupal already knows what the critical content is. Drupal 8 already knows the associated assets. Or better yet… both, combined!

Unfortunately, all of those performance improvements may be in vain when poorly written modules are added to the mix. We're working hard to make it difficult to accidentally degrade performance. But as with any piece of software that allows for so much flexibility, it's always going to be possible to negatively affect performance.

So, in this talk, you'll learn:

• Which steps Drupal 8 has taken to be Fast By Default. Plus the most interesting background information (what was necessary to get there, how you'll benefit out of the box, how you can use it in your projects).
• Which performance aspects are likely to become Faster By Default in Drupal 8.x.0 releases.
• What to watch out for to prevent performance regressions, and how Drupal 8 helps you prevent those.

Last but not least: I will do my utmost best to do live demos of Drupal Big Pipe and automatically inlined critical content!