Posted by arilikeairy on September 26, 2008 at 1:56am
I'm sort of familiar with Drupal but haven't had too much experience. I wanted to start this discussion to ask basic/beginner questions.
A question I'm wondering about right now is the out-of-the-box speed of Drupal. I've installed 4, 5, and 6 (not all at once) and they seem to be slow, right out of the box, with no content or any modules. Why is this? Is it a Drupal problem or is my server not optimizing PHP, or something else?
Has anyone else experienced this?
What are your beginner questions?
Comments
Define slow?
Define slow maybe? It's obviously not going to be as fast as serving static HTML, but I haven't found Drupal to perform any slower than any other interpreted language application.
My Drupal sites are just fast as my non Drupal sites
My Drupal sites are just fast as my non Drupal sites try the site at www.psrunner.com and see if it is slow to you
dashaver
how's your server set up?
I did have serious performance problems with a virtualized solaris server running php as cgi (required in my situation). When I moved onto a dedicated linux box, even running php as cgi, everything was fast. Of course, running php as a module should speed things up even more. My server hosted by glowhost is blazingly fast...too bad I can't use them for my production work.
server setup & defn. of slow
i experience it on two servers - a remote linux/apache/php5/mysql5 server and my localhost windows vista/apache/php5/mysql5. (but vista has issues of its own that cause text pages to load slowly)
embarassingly, i think part of the problem was that i was installing modules into the /modules/ dir rather than /sites/all/modules/. after i realized this it got slightly faster but there is still noticeable lag, especially in admin menus.
my definition of slow: of course it's slower than pure html pages - i suppose my appraisal of slow is relative to other installs i've seen - using other sites or in screencasts i've been watching.
@jakchapman - "running php as a module" ...in apache/solaris or drupal?
tagging like facebook 'interests'?
i'm working on social networking site and currently trying to figure out a way to create something similar to facebook's "interests" section. (ex. i type in a comma separated list of my interests and they show up in my profile as links to a search query of ppl with that interest.)
it seems that "tagging" oneself with interests can automatically provide links to the taxonomy term corresponding to the interest, and there are lot of taxonomy modules to provide addt'l functionality...but i have a few questions:
-in your opinion should i use taxonomy/tagging for this or something like the node hierarchy.module?
-can you provide any insight into how i could possibly get the following accomplished:
--a) have the link result in a view that would search through multiple content types (forum topics, organic groups and other users) in that particular taxonomy term
--b) have multiple categories of tags - like [type of organization], [areas of focus], [location], etc. - and display them separately - right now, even though there are multiple fields in the profile, all tags display right-aligned at the bottom of the page.
i would appreciate any insights, as right now i'm just fumbling around trying to figure it out. thanks! (oh, and i'm also posting this in the social networking group)
My approach would be...
yes. use taxonomy tagging. Its the correct data structure for what you are doing. There are lots of modules that leverage taxonomy.
for part a, simply override the theme the existing taxonomy node list. This will allow you to use the default taxonomy link to a single term (or multiple terms). Since modules like tagadelic and taxonomy menu generate this url form, this will give you the most flexibility. You can get pretty far with css, just use body.page-taxonomy in your selectors.
fro part a, if you do use a view for part a, create a view with an argument that is the taxonomy term that has a filter on a set of node types with a url such as /interests/$arg . You could also use a url that is the default taxonomy term url, you just need to make sure views is above taxonomy in the module order (http://drupal.org/node/125629)
I built an example of this sort of view on a site in development. See http://webmasters.ed.uiuc.edu/interests/1
When posting such questions, you might mention if you are using drupal 5 or 6, if you have experience with cck and views, and if you know php. These generally affect what solutions are possible.
See also:
http://davidherron.com/book/403-directorylike-browsing-drupal-taxonomies
www.johnbarclay.com