[drupal-support] how does the throttle module works?

[Abalieno]

> In 4.6, the throttle has been simplified.  It only has two values:
> on and off.

Bah! I'm tweaking the module to take advantage of all the levels and now you
tell me that they are being wiped with the next version.

I can still use my modified module by replacing it when the new release will
be out or there are other dependences?

Right now I've set the 'default_nodes_main' to adjust dynamically with the
load so that at level 0 the mainpage will show 25 nodes, and progressing
at -5 for each level till it reaches just 5 nodes at level 5. I believe this
modification I did could improve dramatically the performance since I'm
tuning dynamically how the main page is crowded.

> No, the throttle does not affect the cache in any way.
>
>> It does something else behind the scenes like slowing down the php
>> and mySQL  requests?
>
> No, it does not.

This is actually impossibe. Or there's something seriously wrong with drupal
calculation. For my experiments I set the detection accuracy to 100% (so a
check every hit) and the auto-throttle at 1. With these settings Drupal is
supposed to go in emergency mode after five *refresh* of the page.

Even with my crappy connection I'm able to refresh an example page every 4-5
seconds and I kept doing that CONTINUOUSLY. My installation of Drupal has
the cache disabled.

Every 15-20 refreshes of the page I kept seeing the throttle level *lowers*
from 5 to 4. How is this possible if I was there refreshing continuously and
if Drupal parses all my requests?

Something happens, my refreshes are counted till a point, then they go
ignored.

Also: it could be useful to tell the throttle module to enable the caching
in the case the site reaches the fifth level? It would be better than having
the cache always disabled?

> A link from a popular site can certainly cause a cpu spike.
> Enabling the cache can help quite a bit, though every time a user
> leaves a comment the cache is flushed so if you have active
> discussions the benefit of the cache can be minimal.

No, in this specific case it was just about peoples hitting a specific node
all at once.

> Any modules you don't actually use should be disabled.  Any modules
> you don't absolutely need should be set to auto-throttle so they can
> be disabled when the site becomes busy.

But if I have the forum module enabled but noone is browsing the forum nor
there are block related to it on the sitebar, it matters if it's active or
not?

-HRose / Abalieno