[development] Question about Drupal performance

[J-P Stacey]

Lennart Borgman (gmail) wrote:
>  From the admin staff on a web host I am using I got a message saying:
> 
> "Personally I'll recommend Drupal when pigs can fly, because I believe 
> it is just that ... a pig. Slow even when I tried it on my dedicated 
> server... its very full featured, but it is hardly peppy, at the best of 
> times... 

We've just launched a new Drupal site on our server and it didn't even 
register a blip on the server load. Page loading is reasonable, according to 
Firebug - less than a second, but the site is quite image-heavy. We've had 
it down to less than half a second on low-image pages, which is higher than 
Khalid's quoted 100-300ms, but then we've not done any optimization apart 
from turning non-aggressive cacheing on. If we had a large community site 
then we'd have to look into that.

> and, I'm not aware of many Drupal sites on the platform -- 

Well, The Onion seems to do just fine. Maybe their readership has gone down.

	http://www.drupalsites.net/weblink/the-onion

Every month there's a Drupal newsletter listing some new sites, which might 
provide good ammunition for situations just like this. (I'm damned if I can 
actually navigate to the correct forum unless there's a newsletter on the 
drupal.org front page, so someone else will need to find a link - apart from 
anything else I'd like to get our site mentioned in it!)

There's also the aforementioned http://drupalsites.net/ , which at the 
current count is on over 1400 sites.

One option for a hosting company is to run their own core Drupal system, 
with each customer being able to edit the contents of a subdirectory in the 
sites/ directory. That way they can keep control over much of the behaviour, 
keep it patched, remove CPU-hungry bits at their own discretion etc. I've 
not heard of anyone doing this yet, though.

J-P