tuning

The Drupal forum.module has become, well, somewhat infamous for less than awesome scalability. Recently I had a chance to see this firsthand, and track down a solution for managing the long page load times for a client who has a highly trafficked forum. This was not a case of a site that was un-tuned - actually this particular site had a lot of good work and performance enhancements already done to it, including block caching and even some modifications to the forum module that were allowing to work better than it would have without them. But still 5-6 second page load times on /forum persisted.

As a follow up to an earlier article I posted about Drupal 6 performance, and please bear with my learning curve for a moment, I figured out by 'accident', and a lot of investigation, that it matters very much the order one uses when they 'generate content' with the devel module for benchmarking purposes. My previous tests were done incorrectly - I inadvertently created a bunch of nodes that weren't assigned to any terms or users and vice versa. The result of correcting this error means that a no-cache-enabled-baseline takes much longer to complete than when I had things setup incorrectly.

...happily, the point of this article isn't that I'm a total goof.

No, the good news out of this ordeal is that now when block-cache-disabled performance is compared to block-cache-enabled performance the results are MUCH more substantial than previously noted (and thus Drupal 6 is going to be that much faster than it's predecessor Drupal 5 for authenticated users):