Posted by herd45 on August 18, 2012 at 12:51am
Which is faster? Which scales better for large sites with a lot of data and traffic? If Pressflow 6 is faster, is the difference significant enough to consider building a new site with it? I've heard that D7 was slower initially, but there have been improvements more recently that closed the gap.
Comments
You will certainly want to
You will certainly want to build a new, large site on D7. The performance difference between Pressflow 6 and D7 with a properly optimized server stack should be minimal, if even measurable.
Is there any documentation
Is there any documentation that points that out? I've seen posts saying performance from D7 is significantly worse than Pressflow 6.
Unfortunately the world is
Unfortunately the world is too complicated to give a yes/no answer to this question. Here's a great article that outlines the complexities involved:
http://drupalwatchdog.com/1/1/performance-scalability-drupal-7
From my perspective a well tuned Drupal 7 gives comparable performance & scalability to a well tuned Pressflow 6 site. If you start getting into things like MongoDB then the balance starts to shift heavily in favour of D7.
Plus I'm sure that performance isn't the only important thing to you. On every other metric D7 is a vast improvement over D6.
--
Dave Hansen-Lange
Director of Technical Strategy, Advomatic.com
Pronouns: he/him/his
D7
I would go for D7.
D6 performance wiki: http://groups.drupal.org/node/187209
D7 performance wiki: http://groups.drupal.org/node/210683
You MIGHT be able to get D6 to run faster (by applying a lot of patches to pressflow), but D7 has a much lower maintenance cost. We've actually had our average page load times for our D7 site go down with little effort on our end (core is getting faster with each new point release). D6 has taken a lot of effort and I usually end up back porting D7/8 code to D6 when doing these performance improvements.