[drupal-devel] forum.module dependent on comment.module

[Mark]

Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:

>On Fri, 4 Mar 2005, Boris Mann wrote:
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>>On Fri, 04 Mar 2005 19:33:43 -0600, Mark <mark at nullcraft.org> wrote:
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>>>There has been discussion about implementing comments as nodes.  What
>>>would the difficulties be with such a scenario?  If  comments were
>>>nodes, then it would be trivial to specify additional node types that
>>>could be used as comments (files and images, anyone?).  I think if
>>>relativity module were simplified and a lot of the more advanced
>>>features were moved into separate module, just leaving the relationship
>>>management part, this would be quite feasible.
>>>
>>>I'm curious to see what others think about such a scenario.
>>>      
>>>
>>I tried to steer away from the comments-as-nodes discussion, but you
>>seem to have stumbled right into it :P
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>Congrats. ;)
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Yay me!  What do I win? :P

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>>It basically means some major rewriting, and there is value in keeping
>>comments as a separate content type, I think. I'm not willing to dive
>>into this can of worms right now.
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>What it really means is that there will be more nodes. On drupal.org the
>number of entries into the node table will about double. As long as nobody
>cares enough to provide hard test data to show Dries and us others that
>there is a negligible impact on performance this discussion is just hot
>air.
>
>Doing 50 node loads on a single page load can be fun. In contrast, the
>comments get pulled out in one single query.
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This was pretty much my response to suggestions that comments be nodes.  
Even if some crafty SQL guru could pull up a whole thread of comment 
nodes all in one efficient query, each would still need to be fully 
materialized through nodeapi, have access checked, etc.  As nice as it 
would be to have a homogenous view of your content, the physical burden 
of loading and managing it would be significant.  This would be 
perfectly acceptible on high-feature/low traffic sites such as many of 
the tools I've been building lately, but high traffic sites would most 
likely burn a hole in the rack they were mounted to :)

-Mark