Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
From the admin staff on a web host I am using I got a message saying:
"Personally I'll recommend Drupal when pigs can fly, because I believe it is just that ... a pig. Slow even when I tried it on my dedicated server... its very full featured, but it is hardly peppy, at the best of times...
We've just launched a new Drupal site on our server and it didn't even register a blip on the server load. Page loading is reasonable, according to Firebug - less than a second, but the site is quite image-heavy. We've had it down to less than half a second on low-image pages, which is higher than Khalid's quoted 100-300ms, but then we've not done any optimization apart from turning non-aggressive cacheing on. If we had a large community site then we'd have to look into that.
and, I'm not aware of many Drupal sites on the platform --
Well, The Onion seems to do just fine. Maybe their readership has gone down. http://www.drupalsites.net/weblink/the-onion Every month there's a Drupal newsletter listing some new sites, which might provide good ammunition for situations just like this. (I'm damned if I can actually navigate to the correct forum unless there's a newsletter on the drupal.org front page, so someone else will need to find a link - apart from anything else I'd like to get our site mentioned in it!) There's also the aforementioned http://drupalsites.net/ , which at the current count is on over 1400 sites. One option for a hosting company is to run their own core Drupal system, with each customer being able to edit the contents of a subdirectory in the sites/ directory. That way they can keep control over much of the behaviour, keep it patched, remove CPU-hungry bits at their own discretion etc. I've not heard of anyone doing this yet, though. J-P