Drupal performance - the next step

Gerhard — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 12:54:00 +0000

While Drupal's performance is always of interest, it has a hard time defending itself against the features people want to add. There are different ways to address this, but the "less features" approach is usually not defensible. To defend itself from the feature onslaught, Drupal tries to load as few lines of PHP code as possible, which helps to increase performance. A PHP opcode cache (such as APC) helps even more and points the way to where further improvements can be made: outside of conventional PHP. One idea that has come up several times is to create a Drupal-specific PHP extension that will reimplement some of Drupal's often used functions in C. Such an extension exists . It implements Drupal's check_plain and Drupal 7's drupal_static. One of our goals is to examine the gains brought by this approach. Another very interesting approach is to remove PHP entirely from the code that is actually executed by the webserver. There have been a number of attempts over the years, but one can't say that any of them has found wide adoption yet. Hiphop is a recent addition to this group of compilers, it was released by Facebook and is used in production...

Gerhard Mon, 12/13/2010 - 04:54