By Roar-1 on

I recently created a fresh install of Drupal 7 for my blog. However, it's really slow compared to my Drupal 6 blog running on the exact same MediaTemple (DV) server.

Please do a test, and note the load time.

Drupal 6: http://nerdbusiness.com/blog
Drupal 7: http://nerdbusiness.com/blog2

Are you noticing a significant difference?

I'm seeing about about 5 to 7 seconds longer on the Drupal 7 site. If you click around, it's no where near as snappy as the Drupal 6 site.

Thing is, this is basically just plain Drupal 7 with a few extra modules. The theme is lightweight and smaller too. Perplexing!

If you have any ideas - do share, thanks.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

juankvillegas’s picture

juankvillegas commented

I have seen that your D7 posts have dates like "by SCHWABE Feb 20, 20111"

So I think that the problem is that your website has to travel to the future like 18.000 years to search in the database and then travel back to the present to show the results... in fact... it is doing it very fast.

Now being serious... I haven't worked more than 30 minutes in D7

Juan Villegas
micoworker
Diseño y Desarrollo Web

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

Hey, I'm experiencing the same problem. It may be due to some specific config problem with shared server situation, but I'll be GLAD if someone could bring some light into this issue bcause it's holding me back from moving fom D6 to fantastic D7.

This issue does especially apply for the following scenario: a user landing on node/1 after the site has not been used for e.g. a day, afterwards it is working fine on my shared server testsites ... there seems to be something weird with cache expiry / database. Module cache block alter can aggravate the situation, although the site indeed is enormously fast when the chaches are working again, landing on node/1 can be appalingly slow when the site was not used for a couple of hours ...

dddave’s picture

dddave commented

#1064212: Page caching performance has regressed by 30-40%

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

This may very well be the cause, I'm looking forward to the next dev-release including a patch!

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

... as the timezone setting seems to be the issue here, I tried to just turn it off in the regional settings ... for the time being, as a temporary workaround for themedevel usage, this seemed to solve the problem.

Looking forward for a patched D7 core! :-)

Roar-1’s picture

Roar-1 commented

Still haven't found a solution. Here's some benchmarks that clearly show an extra 10 seconds of "waiting" time on the Drupal 7 site, before any files even begin to load:

http://pageload.monitis.com/pagespeed.jsp?url=http://nerdbusiness.com/bl...
http://pageload.monitis.com/pagespeed.jsp?url=http://nerdbusiness.com/bl...

I did some additional tests by disabling javascript, and applying the default theme to the D7 site. Both tests resulted in the same lag issue. So it's not theme or javascript related.

@juankvillegas: hah, thanks I didn't notice that (and still looking for the cause of the extra "1" on dates)

@Thorsten: there's now way to "turn off" the regional settings as a default timezone is needed

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

yepp, trying out the settings (individual selection for timezone per user off) a little more, I had to recognize that it was wishful thinking ... ;-(

Roar-1’s picture

Roar-1 commented

I've come to the conclusion that Drupal 7 is just epic slow. At least on my server anyway.

I just did another split test comparing the "time to first byte" metric for a stock D6 vs stock D7 install. And it shows Drupal 7 as being 347% slower.

http://portal.monitis.com/index.php/tools/instant-website-check

Specifically, after 6 running the above check 6 times for each site, the average time to first byte for Drupal 6 stock on my server is 554 ms. On Drupal 7, it's 1924 ms.

That's almost 2 seconds of 'dead waiting' for the site to even start loading. Is anyone else getting such brutal performance?

Roar-1’s picture

Roar-1 commented

I just installed the Boost module for D7 and performance gain is 2648%. My Drupal 7 site now loads 57% faster than my D6 site.

Average 'time to first byte' for my new D7 site without boost was 5088 ms. After installing boost, the average is now 192 ms.

Life saver.

http://drupal.org/project/boost

Thorsten’s picture

Thorsten commented

I didn't try boost yet for I feared the devel status a little ... of course this bypasses the whole issue. The performance gain is really impressive! Nevertheless, I hope that the core-team will get their tweaks out soon, as for community sites rather shortlived/clever caches are usually more desirable than heavy static caching ...

Keep up the good work, folks!