Robert Douglass: Drupal performance: 10 issues for Drupal 4.8 -

Robert Douglass made a great post that lists some of the new work being done for Drupal 4.8. These are in addition to the high-level conceptual changes like CCK, node_render, install profiles, etc.

These are more low-level performance improvements.

"Here is a list of ten important issues and what they do. Anybody who wants to make a difference in how well Drupal 4.8/5.0 performs will take the time to review and test these patches, easing the work of Dries, Steven and Neil in getting them into core.

* Split up the cache table.

* File-based caching. 

* Set a reasonable age for cached pages.

* Caching of more objects (blocks)."

I was an early adopter of the file cache and still use the older patch in production.  This recent work on the cache subsystem is welcome but also highlights where some more work needs to be done.  Specifically garbage collection and how there is not a fine-grained flushing on changes so updates tend to clear the entire cache.  Hopefully I'll be able to contribute some to this effort.

* Don't SELECT user uid = 0. 

* Allow administrator to set logging level for Watchdog. 

* Pluggable sessions handling and sessions caching. 

* Better default 404 handling in .htaccess for files. 

* No more table locking. 

I  don't have much comment except appreciation for the effort to make the sessions code more modular.

I tend to use lighttpd so I don't use .htaccess/mod_rewrite anyway.

I know some have complained about the table locking on some shared hosting but haven't been hampered by the locks as far as performance goes.

As you can see, there is a lot of work to do, and not much time (3 weeks to the code freeze!), so please, invest in your Drupal future, and take a look at them.

And I thank those that have put a lot of work so far too.  This next release is going to be very cool.