[development] Drupal performance patches: call for action

[Larry Garfield]

On Wednesday 01 August 2007, Dries Buytaert wrote:
> Hello world,
>
> I provided a list of what I believe are the top-6 most important
> performance patches for Drupal 6 and drupal.org (which will run on
> Drupal 6).  If you know people that want to help, please point them to
> http://drupal.org/node/163216#comment-257631 or wherever the latest
> version of that list continues to live on.
>
> The slowest queries on drupal.org are the ones for (1) the tracker
> page, (2) the forum blocks, (3) the forum topics' next/previous links
> and (4) the search module.  Since we disabled most of those features,
> drupal.org is again more usable.  Of course, we want to re-enable all
> of those feature as soon as possible.
>
> To make that happen, we need help from developers and database
> experts. To provide some focus, I compiled a list of the 6 most
> important performance patches that you can help with. I truly hope to
> get some of these into Drupal 6, and to backport them to Drupal 5 so
> we can use them on drupal.org until we upgrade drupal.org to Drupal 6.
>
> Important note: these patches are still allowed to change the APIs in
> Drupal 6, and are about the _only_ patches that can break our APIs
> before Drupal 6 beta 1 is released.  This policy will hopefully help
> us focus -- these issues is where all of our Drupal core action should
> be.
>
> So here is the list:
>
>    1. http://drupal.org/node/147160 - Database replication: database
> replication will help us distribute the load among multiple database
> server. This will help us with (1), (2), (3), (4) and more. Without
> this patch, we can't even take advantage of the extra hardware that
> we're installing. Needless to say, this patch is critical. Some extra
> background information and thoughts are available at
> http://buytaert.net/scaling-with-mysql-replication.

Dries, to clarify here: There's two different approaches currently listed in 
that issue: A) db_query_slave() syntax B) array-with-parameter syntax.  A is 
currently running on s.d.o, while B is closer to what I am hoping to use for 
Drupal 7[1].  In the issue you mentioned that you were concerned about the 
array handling in B.  Do you mean the API or internal $args shuffling?  I 
want to make sure I'm working on the correct problem.

I see 3 options on the replication API front:

1) Use A in Drupal 5.3 and Drupal 6, and switch to B as part of the overhaul 
in Drupal 7.

2) Clean up whatever the remaining objections are to B and use that now so 
there's less API change later.

3) Use A now and drop B completely, keeping A come Drupal 7.  (Not good for 
D7's API, IMO.)

I want to make sure we're on the same page as to the approach so that there's 
no wasted effort.  Which are we doing? :-)

[1] http://www.garfieldtech.com/blog/drupal-7-database-plans

-- 
Larry Garfield			AIM: LOLG42
larry at garfieldtech.com		ICQ: 6817012

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