[development] Drupal performance

[George Kappel]

I recently used http://www.xdebug.org/ xdebug 2.0 beta 6 along with
kcachegrind to debug a performance issue I was having with Drupal
And it helped make it clear where the problem was.  Possibly this profiling
tool would be useful while benchmarking.

1) pecl install xdebug-beta
2) edit php.ini
 extension=xdebug.so  (might need to be zend_extension but seemed to work as
is)
 xdebug.profiler_enable_trigger=1
3) add XDEBUG_PROFILE to URL e.g. .../node/add?XDEBUG_PROFILE
4) use kcachegrind to open trace file in /tmp

I will write up my discoveries as soon as I get a chance although most of
them are specific to sites with very large menus and the category module.


George Kappel
 

> 
> > 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
> 
> 
>