[development] Drupal performance

[Jeff Eaton]

> From: Dries Buytaert [mailto:dries.buytaert at gmail.com] 
> 
> recently I did some performance analysis of Drupal and 
> compared it to  
> Joomla.
> 
> Unfortunately, Drupal is quite slow when it comes to 
> generating non-cached pages.  It would be great if we
> could focus some more on the performance of non-cached
> pages.  Why?  Because in practice, it is often a _lot_
> more important than the performance of cached pages.

Do we have any clear ideas about where the bottlenecks lie? Database
access? Processing time for rendering complex structural pages and
forms? We have handbook pages for writing secure module code. It might
be a good idea to provide solid (benchmarked) performance tips to module
developers as well. What particular Drupal calls are expensive? What
uses of common drupal APIs cause more thrashing than others? Etc...

--Jeff