[support] Fed up with Drupal 7 ... Desperately.....modules.etc

[Roger]

Thank you for this in depth discussion it is much appreciated, and yes, 
I do appreciate the ease with which Drupal "sets up" a full blown site.
I also very much appreciate the highly professional way people respond, 
no flame wars, no ridicule, just patient insightful information. Thank you.

My observations to date:
-- Our server runs Centos 6 and php 5.3
-- Drupal is a great system but can suffer from less than optimal module 
coding as explained below.
-- Some sites have 60 and more modules and work flawlessly.
-- Our site works flawlessly for the most part.
-- We have 41 modules soon to be about 45ish when I start the newsletter 
system so number of modules, in our case,  is not a problem because most 
are not used in normal operation or called infrequently but are still 
required.
-- We have a very minimal site with very low demand from users, minimal 
demand on modules, minimal calls on database (until I get the newsletter 
system working) and few display calls, little of the below discussion 
relates to our requirements.
-- Add Content Type is still a problem, it seems to unexpectedly fail.
-- Based on  a previous response,  adding a Content Type, seems to have 
much broader issues with far greater overhead than I first understood.
-- Apart from altering php memory_limit, which works sometimes but has 
wider implications for the whole site,  there is no definitive answer to 
this Add Content Type problem.
--There seems to be no pressing need to have greater than 128M allocated 
to PHP. Our ISP support team advise against increasing above 128M.

Conclusion:
It seems that Add Content Type puts outrageously heavy demand on a system.
Why it has 17 includes unrelated to creating a content type,
Calls 18 scripts, all but node/content_types, completely unrelated and 
unnecessary at this point,
a huge jQuery that has nothing at all to do with anything,
irrelevant menu lists that are switched off, not in use, or not in the 
least related to this display,
I am not sure.

Reading about Ruby on Rails and separating out the business logic from 
data and  views. Looking at the underlying code for Drupal Add Content 
Type it seems there is a need to separate out much of the business 
logic. But I do not know if this can be done with PHP.

As below, optimising Drupal means stripping things away, but when faced 
with this, stripping can't help much.
Roger

<snip>
Every module is coded in a different way. While some can be benign, 
others might be less so. Some modules create additional load because 
they force pages to be re-rendered, or for permissions to be re-checked 
and so forth. This is a community-project, which means lots of free 
great code, but also not everything is coded perfectly at all times, 
since everyone is contributing in an open source fashion. Each module 
that is activated also creates some additional function calls, depending 
on the functions found, those functions will either run once and be 
cached, or be perpetually accessed every time their hook_ is called. Is 
adding one more hook_ a problem? Not inherently, but clearly the more 
you add, the more calls need to be made. If you want a system that can 
handle hundreds of modules, each with potentially tens of functions, 
each of which is doing a calculation then surely that increases your 
server's stress? There is nothing magic about any CMS, it is, as you 
say, just a bunch of PHP code. An optimal system needs careful 
consideration. If you want a site like facebook, where you are dealing 
with tremendous stress considerations, you generally just build the site 
up from scratch. No CMS, you put all the parts together, with the 
absolute zero-line that anything non-essential is scrapped. If you have 
the budget to build your site from the ground-up, you just don't bother 
with any CMS and build your own (or use an extremely lightweight 
framework as your base point). Drupal gives you a lot out of the box, 
not many CMS's can crunch out full blown applications with such 
flexibility and extensibility, but flexibility comes with a price. 
Optimizing Drupal sometimes involves stripping things away, researching 
how things were done by others, and improving the code that others have 
made. Your question and concern is extremely general, so it is hard to 
give you anything concrete in return. Can you run a complex application 
on Drupal? Absolutely Can you run a site that has an extremely fast 
response time? Most definitely Can Drupal be used on a website that has 
high traffic, sometimes with burst traffic intervals? For sure can I get 
a high performant site, by installing any module I find on the net, 
keeping it on, and just expect that clicking "setup" is enough to 
achieve high performance, and high speed? Doubtful? You need to be good 
at web development to be good at performance and optimization. It is a 
very complex subject, and many solutions, depending on need, can bring 
you beyond drupal, to things like memcache / apache / mysql 
optimization. Drupal gives you a giant flexible application building 
API/environment. You then need to take care of it to make sure it 
retains high performance. Hope this helps! -- Info Razor Sent with 
Sparrow (http://www.sparrowmailapp.com/?sig)
</snip>