Drupal core is pretty well optimized. But after you've finished building your Drupal 7 or 8 site, you might find some pages are loading slower than you'd like. That's not surprising—you've probably enabled scores of contrib modules, written custom code, and are running over 100 SQL queries per uncached request.

Recently, I've been working on the search interface for McGill University's course catalog. The University wants to allow students to browse courses at friendly URLs like: