[development] Drupal performance patches: call for action

[Dries Buytaert]

On 01 Aug 2007, at 11:37, Gerhard Killesreiter wrote:
> Yeah, I'd be one of the people who have reservations on this,  
> especially
> on the node_counter part. This will give a lot of writes to the node
> table, which is a stupid thing to do considering that the rest of the
> table is -+ static (compared to the node counter table).

Here is the concise summary:

  1. Locality of information is important -- it avoids queries.  If  
you use A and B together, you want to get that data in one query.   
This holds for both spatial and temporal locality.

  2. You want to split cold and hot data -- it avoids having to load  
large amounts of data into memory.

Sometimes, both are at odds -- especially when MySQL's locking comes  
into play.

In case of the user access table it might make sense to split of the  
access-field.  It's a "cold" field; it's hardly ever read but it does  
get some writes.  Because the field is almost never read, the fact  
that we loose spatial locality isn't much of a concern.

The node_counter field is both read and write heavy.  By splitting it  
off, you loose the locality advantage and it's not clear what is more  
important: the fact that we can simplify thousands of read queries,  
or the fact that we can avoid some table locking.  Only extensive  
benchmarks can tell.

--
Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/