[consulting] Sluggishness Concern - thoughts on Drupal problem solving

[Domenic Santangelo]

On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:26 AM, Dave Maddox <davesoftdes at gmail.com> wrote:
> Thoughts on Drupal problem solving (no real fix for Sam here, sorry):
<good stuff snipped>

To bring what Dave said into the realm of actionable steps, I've found
code profiling to be immensely helpful in diagnosing strange
performance problems. You might discover some really interesting
things -- a couple months ago I found that a high-traffic page on a
client site was module_invoke'ing hundreds and hundreds of times and
bogging that page down big time because of it. Issues like that only
get bigger the more modules you've got, and they had a TON. Turns out
it was some legacy code that wasn't even doing anything anymore (!)
except for taking up a bunch of CPU cycles.

Point being, some standard development/performance practices (like
code profiling) can help a lot, especially when recurring costs need
to be low. In startup land, a few dev days optimizing code is often
much more feasible than throwing more hardware at it.

-D