performance

Hi Highperformance Group!

Our organisation started using Drupal about a year ago. We are experiencing very slow page loads on our website - often up to 1 min or more. The server load average correspondingly high - mostly around 4-5, some times up to 30-40 and even more.

Hey, I'm new to this group and I'm very happy of joining you.
In my company, we're migrating our news sites based on an old Java CMS that we've built some years ago to Drupal.
Our major concern is Drupal's performance, so we're starting to work on an architecture for it. For our old cms we used to generate static pages so the only job for apache was to serve those htmls. I don't know if there a way for Drupal to do this and at the same time have people logged in in the back-end creating nodes. What would be a good architecture for this? We have about 50k unique users a day and growing.

Here's a little more information on the patch I mentioned last night (by Wim Leers):

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blockquote>
drupal_lookup_path() optimization - skip looking up certain paths in drupal_lookup_path()

Description
Why?
To reduce the number of queries per page that are completely useless, I've written this optimization.

Configuration
You get a new config page at admin/build/path/skiplist to modify the skiplist. The paths listed here can include wildcards as well as '', in the exact same way you can configure on what pages a block should (not) be listed.

What has changed to make this work?

I just wanted to post an announcement that we've finally gotten out a point-update of the Project Mercury AMI. Just in case you were wondering if this project would continue, it will! I've been really excited and encouraged by all the positive feedback so far, so keep your ideas and questions coming. The 0.51-Alpha release includes a number of bugfixes and improvements, most notably it:

• Is based on the latest Pressflow including Drupal Core 6.14 and Simpletest 2.9
• Fixes the self-update process to merge correctly and pull from Pressflow's lovely new VCS home on Launchpad
• Includes the rc1 version of cacherouter
• Fixes postfix and s3 metadata issues so there's now a working MTA out of the box

Most importantly for people considering this stack for production deployments, we're now bundling 64-bit images with every release. The quickest way to find the AMIs is to keyword search for "mercury" in your favorite EC2 console. More information and AMI ids are below the fold. Let me know what you think, and what you'd like to see next!

Lately I have been trying to get my server to be better at performance. So far it has been going well, but the beast currently as many people know is apache. The server im running drupal on is only running drupal. So my goal is to trim it down as much as possible and only have the apache modules I need to run drupal. I am alternately considering installing nginx as it is much lighter than apache. I have been reading the drupal performance articles on 2bits.com and it has helped but i have not found many articles on trimming apache this much.

Looking for an efficient Drupal consultant that can help us with configuration of our site for an upcoming launch. The would include configuration of the database, PHP, caches, web server, .. all the usual suspects. We are on Linux, have quite a few modules, views, blocks, OG, etc. Most of our settings are out of the box. This should be a pretty quick project.

We would like to find someone with substantial experience with performance around Drupal. Would lead to later engagements, too.

We would prefer on site for limited parts of the project, but are open to remote work.

Do you still use spawn-fcgi with Nginx? It's time to consider PHP-FPM.

PHP in the form in which it is available from php.net has a number of well-known issues associated with the use of the FastCGI SAPI in production. See this comparison chart of problems and how php-fpm handles them, when enabled with the FastCGI SAPI.

Features available only in PHP-FPM:

These days I've added a feature table to Caching: Modules that make Drupal scale, this group's wiki page for comparison of performance and scalability modules, started by Mike Carper some time ago.

This follows other Drupal module comparison pages, trying to make it simple and clear for most normal cases, so that a majority of users can easily understand the basics and use them. Anyone can naturally share additional info. Let's hope the wiki will be useful for Drupal users.

I'm curious if anyone has ever ran into a site or project where they went taxonomy crazy where there were TOO many taxonomies on a node?

3-4 Categories can be common and useful, but at what point do the taxonomies become a burden to performance? 10? 50?

Gut feeling says 5 or less would be optimal, but is it ok to have 10 or 20? I'm curious to get people's thoughts. If anyone has used a ton of taxonomies in a project I'm curious if it worked out for their site. Any links to articles/posts about the topic would be helpful too.

thanks!

Hi everyone,

Have been doing one project on my spare time, and now as it is 80+% ready, time to think about performance.

http://hotweb.lt - feel free to visit :) It is a site being built on Drigg modules and some complementary ones. Have no plans to use Views or CCK. Maybe in the near future will be some modules for community building. No hacks on Drupal 6 core and no changes to DB structure are made.

Some facts:

Not using APC or eAccelerator.