CCK produces aggressive cache warning, but still works

This is extremely important: on high traffic sites, the boost from including files in hook_init() is far outweighed by the loss of agressive caching.

Dopry's suggesting in http://drupal.org/node/108506 to move content_admin functions to a separate module is a better alternative. For now, can the http://cvs.drupal.org/viewcvs/drupal/contributions/modules/cck/content_a... commit be rolled back?

Er, my bad, I overlooked that.

There were three includes loaded in global scope before :
content_views.inc
pathauto.inc
content_crud.inc

I guess having the first two in hook_init is not problematic, or is it too ?

More generally I thought the general rule for modules was to avoid anything in global scope.
Did I invent that, or is this no longer true due to aggressive caching, or is there a third way ?

I guess having the first two in hook_init is not problematic, or is it too ?

It is, unfortunately -- in a nutshell, any module that implements hook_init() breaks aggressive caching. I can help dig into alternatives for performance, but the high-performance sites that are most sensitive to performance issues will be hit harder by the loss of aggressive caching... we're seeing that on two large-scale sites right now.

Perhaps it would make sense to put the inclusion code inside the wrapper functions. For example, content_pathauto() could issue a require_once() inside the function itself, keeping the main code clean.

hook_menu(), when $may_cache is FALSE, is another option.

Well, I'd like to avoid hook_menu for content_views.inc because it has to be loaded before views_menu executes, and thus we embark in {system}.weight niceness... As a matter of fact I stole this hook_init optimization code from OG - see http://drupal.org/node/102526#comment-174676. OG might therefore be affected as well ?
And content_pathauto.inc in hook _menu does not seem recommended either : http://drupal.org/node/60526

And, sorry for being blunt, but I don't really understand why implementing hook_init would _break_ aggressive caching.
Looking at the code, it seems aggressive caching (as opposed to normal) "simply" does not call init_hooks.
So a warning is issued on admin/settings/performance stating that the modules implementing hook_init _might_ not function properly, and not the other way around : it's not aggressive caching that will break, if I get this right.
You're not telling me that hook_init has become a forbidden hook, right ? :-)

Meaning statistics.module for instance _will_ lose some functionality, but content.module should not be affected. With the current code, we're not including the files even with normal caching (if (function_exists('drupal_set_content')) { part). To me, content.module is behaving the same for normal or aggressive caching.

I did a little basic testing on functionality and aggressive caching seemed to work with CCK. I haven't dug into all the ins and outs but viewing content worked fine and everything displayed.

I did some additional investigation, and I'd like to offer an apology -- you're right. CCK does work fine with aggressive caching, as it doesn't *have* to execute when caching is in effect. Thus, the user just receives unnecessary warnings when turning on aggressive caching. They can ignore them in this case, whereas they can't with something like statistics.module. :-)

What warnings will they see? Let's just document that so they don't worry when they see them.

On the aggressive caching page, it says, "The following modules are incompatible with aggressive caching, and will not work properly: content." Devel is another such module. It basically looks for anything that implements hook_init().

We should remove the need for hook_init(), I opened a task for this, so closing this one

Just to make it easier to find, the followup issue is at http://drupal.org/node/127106.

Er, right. Thanks Karen, I got lazy on this one :-)