[drupal-devel] Drupal performance testing

[Jose A. Reyero]

Kieran Lal wrote:

> Hello, we, Trellon and CivicSpace Labs,  are doing Drupal performance 
> testing for a client.  We will be sharing the results with the 
> community.  We identified three areas to focus on for performance 
> testing.
>
> 1) First we would like to reduce the memory requirements of running 
> Drupal so that we can run more Apache processes.
> -Please advise if there are particular configurations of Drupal that 
> you recommend to reduce memory usage.
> -Are there particular contributed modules that we should avoid 
> because of memory issues.  We are looking at flexinode, event, 
> location, and event finder, as well as organic groups.

Hi Kieran.

IMHO, one of the main problems about Drupal performance and scalability
is that memory requirements, which just grow as you enable more modules.
So my option to keep memory low is usually to use the less modules
possible. About how much load each module adds you can have a general
idea by looking at how much php code it includes, for which plain file
size is good indicator.

I've started some work in this direction, but I dont think it will be
ready for version 4.7. However I've posted a simple proof of concept
patch, this one: http://drupal.org/node/27901.

Another concern I have about memory usage is templated themes vs plain
php ones. I'd like to get some real data on this, as for now is just a
guess.

Hope this helps.