Hello world, I provided a list of what I believe are the top-6 most important performance patches for Drupal 6 and drupal.org (which will run on Drupal 6). If you know people that want to help, please point them to http://drupal.org/node/163216#comment-257631 or wherever the latest version of that list continues to live on. The slowest queries on drupal.org are the ones for (1) the tracker page, (2) the forum blocks, (3) the forum topics' next/previous links and (4) the search module. Since we disabled most of those features, drupal.org is again more usable. Of course, we want to re-enable all of those feature as soon as possible. To make that happen, we need help from developers and database experts. To provide some focus, I compiled a list of the 6 most important performance patches that you can help with. I truly hope to get some of these into Drupal 6, and to backport them to Drupal 5 so we can use them on drupal.org until we upgrade drupal.org to Drupal 6. Important note: these patches are still allowed to change the APIs in Drupal 6, and are about the _only_ patches that can break our APIs before Drupal 6 beta 1 is released. This policy will hopefully help us focus -- these issues is where all of our Drupal core action should be. So here is the list: 1. http://drupal.org/node/147160 - Database replication: database replication will help us distribute the load among multiple database server. This will help us with (1), (2), (3), (4) and more. Without this patch, we can't even take advantage of the extra hardware that we're installing. Needless to say, this patch is critical. Some extra background information and thoughts are available at http://buytaert.net/scaling-with-mysql-replication. 2. http://drupal.org/node/148849 - Merge {node_comment_statistics} and {node_counter} into {node}: looking at the slow query log on Drupal.org we have reasons to believe that this patch could help us with (1) and (2) and (4). There are some reservations as well so we need people to help benchmark this patch so we can weigh the advantages and the disadvantages. After some good testing and benchmarking, we should be able to drive this patch home. 3. http://drupal.org/node/80951 - Block caching: being able to cache expensive blocks would help us with (2) as it eliminates expensive queries. 4. http://drupal.org/node/105639 - Tracker query rewrite: would help us with (1) because it rewrites an expensive query. 5. http://drupal.org/node/146466 - Link handling in search module: this patch reduces the complexity of the search module and will help with (4). I helps performance and it makes for a better search. 6. http://drupal.org/node/106559 - Path lookups: we're brainstorming about how we could reduce the number of look ups required for URL aliasing. I think we need to look at de-normalizing the path alias table, but there are some other ideas that are being proposed, measured and discussed. There are likely to be more patches, but I'd like to start with those. It's more than enough work already, and it is better not to spread ourselves too thin. If you're convinced that there might be a more important performance patch, you can work on that too. I recommend that you bookmark these issues in your browser's toolbar and that you ask you boss whether you can spend some time working on these patches. ;) Thanks, -- Dries Buytaert :: http://buytaert.net/