And Drupal already has a nasty reputation for running a boat-load of database queries. Is your website highly trafficked and dealing with huge amounts of data to be retrieved and displayed in real-time? This will put an extra strain on your MySQL database. So, how do you optimize your Drupal database? Needless to add that this is the most straightforward way to give your website a rendering performance boost: The lighter and clutter-free your database tables are, the better your SQL query times will be. And, the faster your web pages will load..