Darrel O'Pry wrote:
I think cck and views are god sends, but I don't think they are ideal for sites that hope to get hit hard and heavy, where more normalized table structures, and less code abstraction can make a big difference.
The again the time and memory used for 20 custom modules(loading and compiling included) may be more than that used by 1 cck module with 20 content type definitions and associated views.
Please be aware that both CCK and Views attempt to aggressively cache their data. Meaning that reading a CCK node is a single load from cache. Views, likewise, tries to cache the actual query used. (it's not always possible, queries with arguments simply aren't cacheable). But the query builder is actually remarkably more efficient than I had given it credit for -- the query builder took only slightly more time off of a page than it took to build the user login form when I was profiling it.