Required require_once rant! Why oh why do you feel compelled to use include_once/require_once everywhere? Paranoid bootstrap code: And what's with the DB autoloader? array( 'QueryPlaceholderInterface', 'QueryConditionInterface', 'DatabaseCondition', 'Query', 'DeleteQuery', 'InsertQuery', 'UpdateQuery', 'MergeQuery', 'TruncateQuery', 'QueryAlterableInterface', ), 'select.inc' => array('QueryAlterableInterface', 'SelectQueryInterface', 'SelectQuery', 'SelectQueryExtender'), 'database.inc' => array('DatabaseConnection'), 'log.inc' => array('DatabaseLog'), 'prefetch.inc' => array('DatabaseStatementPrefetch'), 'schema.inc' => array('DatabaseSchema'), ); ]]> Pretty much every Drupal page is going to read from the database, so just load at least query.inc and select.inc on every request. You can autoload the less frequently used things. Not wild about this either: Which comes from this bootstrap code: 0; $i--) { for ($j = count($server); $j > 0; $j--) { $dir = implode('.', array_slice($server, -$j)) . implode('.', array_slice($uri, 0, $i)); if (isset($sites[$dir]) && file_exists(DRUPAL_ROOT . '/' . $confdir . '/' . $sites[$dir])) { $dir = $sites[$dir]; } if (file_exists(DRUPAL_ROOT . '/' . $confdir . '/' . $dir . '/settings.php') || (!$require_settings && file_exists(DRUPAL_ROOT . '/' . $confdir . '/' . $dir))) { $conf = "$confdir/$dir"; return $conf; } } } $conf = "$confdir/default"; return $conf; } ]]> The easy fix is to just hardcode the conf path and remove all calls to the conf_path() function. After fixing all these, we shaved off 10ms of latency and gained about 1.5 requests/sec: