Hello all, I just wrote a blog post that makes reference to a post that popped up at the SUPPORT list that I believe is timely to your discussion here. More on Drupal and Usability http://lizasabater.com/more_on_drupal_and_usability Interesting enough, here's another post at the SUPPORT list that ends with words that echo the usability issues I feel are involved with the module bloat discussion :
BTW, it would be so easy to be able to move body and title (and taxonomy) in the CCK configuration screen (they have fixed weight)
http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/support/2007-November/006752.html Cheers, / liza On 22.Nov.2007, at 01:22 PM, Khalid Baheyeldin wrote:
On Nov 22, 2007 4:41 AM, J-P Stacey <jp.stacey@torchbox.com> wrote: Greg Holsclaw wrote:
Drupal 6 will better optimize this issue by allowing module developers to better include only the needed files through the menu system, thus reducing overall memory usage without adding much overhead for opening more files. I am sure chx would give a better summary.
I was just thinking, what might be nice, then, is for there to be some standard way of componentizing a module, and bringing in bits of it based on the URL. I take it from the mention of menu that that's what D6 does?
Module splitting has happened as part of D6, mostly along the lines of admin stuff and regular stuff. However, it can be further tuned to be more granular, but it has to be on a module by module basis. No general rule can work for all possible permutations.
If you introduce a precompiler to minimize the file hits in such a system as Khalid mentions, would that nullify the effect you're after on the memory? Do precompilers typically work within the allocated memory of the apache processes and hence bloat them just the same?
Effectively, if you have a shared memory based op-code cache (e.g. APC), then yes, the splitting becomes moot. Remember that not all people can have an op-code cache (e.g. shared hosts), so there is benefit to those from splitting the modules.
Op-code caches do save memory, since the code is loaded ONCE, parsed, tokenized and stored as tokens. So, the memory footprint becomes less per Apache process.
Cheers, J-P -- J-P Stacey +44 (0)1608 811870 http://torchbox.com
-- Khalid M. Baheyeldin 2bits.com http://2bits.com Drupal optimization, development, customization and consulting.