Posted by DrupalHack on November 15, 2013 at 5:39pm
I'm currently moving a fairly large site off of a poor execution of Display Suite, and onto Panels, Panels Everywhere, and Panelizer.
The site has around 800 nodes, many many views, and lot's of different functionalities that make it heavy already. I'm concerned that moving to pure panels is going to slow it down even more.
With Panels caching abilities, how much is too much? Should I cache every view, field, pane, layout and variant? Would it be redundant to do that? In other words, is caching a panel pane doing the same work as caching each individual field inside the pane as well?
Are panel caches refreshed with cron, or only a manual cache clear?
Any thoughts or feedback would be very appreciated.
Comments
First take a tour of
First take a tour of https://luthierbuilt.net, which makes heavy use of page manager (mainly panels). Also utilizes mini-panels, panelizer, and of course views. It also utilizes DS display modes for rows that make up the rows of Solr search results; i.e., consider any view based on a Solr index that exposes filters, such that the view cannot be cached, yet the individual rows that are displayed in a given search result can and should be cached.
I certainly do not cache at all layers of the site's common use cases. Rather, I prefer caching at the highest level of abstraction that is possible.
Other than that, it is hard to generalize. I think through every use case and consider what seems the best layer at which to utilize caching. I definitely do not cache at multiple layers of a use case, except perhaps in those instances where a component at a lower layer is utilized in multiple use cases.
So, I may cache an entire panel. I may cache selected panes of a panel. I may cache a view. I may cache a mini-panel or several of its components. Etc.
Other than that, I utilize things like Entity Cache.
In case it matters to you, this site is hosted by Pantheon (getpantheon.com). Among other things, Pantheon sites can employ Redis for caching of DB items; this site uses Redis default configuration.
Don't know if any of this is helpful to you, but that's as much as I can say without being in the same room with a whiteboard.
Oh, I do NOT use Panels Everywhere, and have never convinced myself of any reason to. The theme is a commercial Adaptive Theme.
Best wishes,
Bob
As an avid user of Panels, I
As an avid user of Panels, I don't have an answer for you. But I have a suggestion, and that would be to deploy on a server that has Varnish available to you. (Acquia, Drupion, anybody else?) Because I deploy to a server running Varnish I don't concern myself with Panels performance (or Views performance for that matter.)
Add Pantheon
Add Pantheon (getpantheon.com) to the list.
I should add that Varnish
I should add that Varnish isn't the only reason why you should seek out a Drupal-specific host. When a vendor puts their weight behind Drupal, they are also figuring out how to tune their servers to provide the maximum amount of performance. For example, I use HotDrupal for many small, civic sites. Very fast for a shared (VPS) host and very affordable. Makes life a ton easier.