performance

Yes, there is a version jump compared to the previous 7.44 release; this is to indicate that this Drupal 7 point release is a bit larger than past ones and makes a few more changes and new features available than normal.

Updating your existing Drupal 7 sites is recommended. Backwards compatibility is still being maintained, although read on to find out about a couple of changes that might need your attention during the update.

The image above illustrates how BigPipe can help even slow-to-render pages deliver usable content to the browser very quickly. If you have a block in a sidebar that pulls in some data from an external service, or only one tiny user-specific block (like a "Welcome, Jeff!" widget with a profile picture) that takes a half second or longer to render, Drupal can now serve the majority of a page immediately, then send the slower content when it's ready.

The image above illustrates how BigPipe can help even slow-to-render pages deliver usable content to the browser very quickly. If you have a block in a sidebar that pulls in some data from an external service, or only one tiny user-specific block (like a "Welcome, Jeff!" widget with a profile picture) that takes a half second or longer to render, Drupal can now serve the majority of a page immediately, then send the slower content when it's ready.

Allows to use ImageMagick or GraphicsMagick as image toolkit for Image API in Drupal 7 and 8 core. This integration is based on invoking the convert binary through shell access to process images. The Imagick module is an alternative toolkit module that uses the Imagick PHP extension instead.

Safely remove a limited number of items from the cache_form table. This module provides a drush command drush safe-cache-form-clear that can be run at a high frequency, keeping the table at a reasonable size. It requires that you use the database cache back-end for the cache_form table. Drupal's core cron can have problems clearing out the cache_form table when it grows extremely large. This module works around this by limiting the number of items expired from the cache in a single run, dealing with a single manageable chunk at a time.