[development] Conditionally include include files

[Larry Garfield]

Documentation here: http://drupal.org/node/146172

Wiki page to coordinate the refactoring effort here: 
http://groups.drupal.org/node/4179

Feedback on both welcome.

Note: If you are working on a page that has a heavy affect on a given module, 
please add it to the "Blocked on" list!  I'd rather we wait a week or three 
before splitting a module up than have a patch collision with something 
you're doing, thus wasting both your time and ours. :-)  

I've assigned myself aggregator to start since I don't think anything 
particularly interesting is happening with it, so it's reasonably 
collision-safe.

On Tuesday 22 May 2007, Larry Garfield wrote:
> I will be writing up the appropriate handbook page later tonight when I get
> home, and will follow-up in this thread with a link when it exists.  The
> outstanding optimization questions that I don't have a firm answer for yet
> are:
>
> 1) Are there any very-common page handlers that should be left in the main
> module file to avoid the extra disk hit (eg, node_page)?  We'll need to
> test and see what the extra disk hit cost is.
>
> 2) As a general rule for simplicity I am going to suggest in the docs
> modulename.pages.inc and modulename.admin.inc for user-side and admin-side
> pages respectively.  However, do we want to break it down even further? 
> How much breakdown is appropriate, though?  One file per handler would have
> the least extra code parsing overhead, but the most maintenance overhead
> for the developer.  I'm not sure what the right trade-off point is there. 
> It may also be different for core vs. contrib modules.
>
> In addition to claiming modules to work on, if there are any pending
> patches that make substantial changes to a core module that need to go in
> before code freeze let us know about those, too, so we can not touch that
> module yet.  This performance refactoring can stretch post-1 June I believe
> since there's no API changes (Dries, correct me if that's an incorrect
> statement), and I'd rather not block someone else's patch that's
> almost-there. :-)
>
> --Larry Garfield
>
> On Tue, 22 May 2007 08:01:58 +0200, Dries Buytaert 
<dries.buytaert at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hello world,
> >
> > I just committed patch http://drupal.org/node/140218, which enables
> > us to split module files into multiple (include) files.  With this
> > patch, it is the router's (menu system) responsibility to load the
> > correct include file -- i.e. the include file that has the active
> > callback's code.  In other words, depending on the active callback,
> > Drupal can conditionally load include files rather than having to
> > load the entire world.
> >
> > This is an important patch as it enables us to load less code --
> > hence, it can offer an important performance boost.  Kudos to all the
> > people who helped make this possible.  :-)
> >
> > The patch that has been committed implements the system to accomplish
> > that, but doesn't actually split modules.  There is only one new .inc
> > file that has been committed with this patch that acts as an example.
> >
> > Now this patch landed, the natural next step would be to fire up your
> > profilers, and to split a couple more big modules in Drupal core --
> > and to report back the performance improvements that you observe with
> > that.
> >
> > --
> > Dries Buytaert  ::  http://www.buytaert.net/


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

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