CCK performance (or lack of)

Here at Lonely Planet we have been looking into CCK for our own projects so we can create easily supported sites which don't need developer input to do simple things like adding additional fields.

But during this time I discovered how bad the performance actually is. Like everyone I thought that adding fields that were not multiple or shared you would get the best performance.

Well I was wrong, and spent a while making sure that I was correct. And I was.

So during some other enhancements I needed to fix the CCK so that performance was much better.

So what I found is that sharing a field or having multiple occurrences really have no less performance impact than single fields.

Even though the fields are built in a fairly good way so that multiple single fields are in a single table, they are still being loaded 1 at a time. So if you have 30 fields added to a node it will do 30 selects to load all the fields, and I like the fact that it will be 30 deletes just to mack sure that it really have been deleted.

My team and I at Lonely Planet have been working hard on to fix these issues and are just about to submit a huge patch to fix this issue and add associated fields to CCK.

I have included a presentation that I gave to Lonely Planet and a few other people which shows how bad the problem actually is. I hope to submit this patch in the next 2 weeks (as I am on holiday this week) and we are still putting it though it's paces.

This patch is for Drupal 5, and we are hoping that this could be included in the next Drupal 5 release of CCK which I think is really needed.

I know that this has been fixed in D6, but actually my patch is still faster than D6 esp. when it comes to multiple fields.