By eigentor on

Why, oh why is drupal.org so ridiculously slow at times? Right now it has taken me up to 10 Seconds to load a new page.
Drupal prides itself to be one of the fastest CMS around. So it would be, for usability and even more for showcase reasons be an obvious task to optimize the server's performance.

What do you think?

Comments

jacauc’s picture

jacauc commented

Maybe it's something related to your internet connection.
For me it's one of the fastest pages of all the sites I visit.

Have a look at http://www.websiteoptimization.com/services/analyze/wso.php?url=http://d...

Nothing wrong there

xjm’s picture

xjm
she/her
Primary language English
commented

I don't think it's anything related to anyone's connection--the site is, indeed, very slow at times, regardless if I'm using broadband at home or the significantly faster connection at my university, and while other sites load fine. Note, though, that it's not a consistent issue--just a sporadic one. I'm therefore assuming it's related to the load on the site.

I wonder if the "slowness spikes" are related to operations on the cache table (or tables in 5.0). The cache tables actually contain the cached binary data, which I imagine can get pretty big with all the content on drupal.org. I've been told that at least one high-traffic site using drupal has had to move the binary data out of the cache table to keep the site from choking every time old data is deleted from the table.

Or it could be something else entirely. Probably only the drupal.org admins could tell us for sure. :)

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mo6’s picture

mo6
he/him
Primary language Dutch
commented

I also experience slowness of Drupal.org at times. Especially when logged in (which is logical due to Drupal caching). But also when not logged in, Drupal.org sometimes takes several seconds to produce a page. My connection is not loaded and other sites load very fast. Is it time to throw in some extra servers in the Drupal server park?

mo6’s picture

mo6
he/him
Primary language Dutch
commented

Initial d.o. frontpage: 5 seconds
Logging in: 5 seconds
Recent posts: more than 10 seconds
My recent posts: more than 10 seconds
Modules / browse by name: more than 10 seconds

Luckily I'm a patient guy, but I'd like to see a more snappy response. Can we raise some funds to buy additional servers?

themoors’s picture

themoors commented

This is something I have noticed over the last week or so.

gray97’s picture

gray97 commented

It has been slow for me about 40% of the time. Sometimes, it wouldn't load at all. Not too good for a great CMS home.

jacauc’s picture

jacauc commented

Could some of you do the benchmark on the websiteoptimization site and post results when you experience slowness again?
It will reflect there as a longer loading time. I guess it would be impossible to benchmark an authenticated user from that site though.

Thanks
jacauc

daniel.hunt’s picture

daniel.hunt commented

I've been noticing it for the past 6 months really. It hasn't anything to do with the recent upgrade to 5.0 - it was just as bad with 4.7

zoon_unit’s picture

zoon_unit commented

ALL my Drupal sites are slow. Drupal.org takes several seconds (4-8) to load the initial page. (if I'm logged in) Subsequent pages loads are faster, but queries like search, or tabbed pages are excruciatingly slow.

This is the same regardless of the server. My two development sites on Dreamhost, with virtually no data, also suffer from the 4-8 second lag.

As do the development versions on my local Windows Xampp server, even though nothing is traveling over the Internet. I've got a pretty fast machine too.

dnguyen’s picture

dnguyen commented

So would this argue for the case of it NOT being a problem with the database side? That is, your sites being slow even without too much data?

I'm running a site off of an in-house server...and I get about a four second lag as well.

dries’s picture

dries commented

The fact Drupal.org got slower is due to Drupal's, and Drupal.org's, continued growth. We grew by more than 240% in 2006 and are now serving more than 10 million pages a month. I believe that the total bandwidth exceeds 2 TB a month. While we grow by 240%, our infrastructure didn't. We'll have to add another server to our setup to make things snappy again.

In the mean time, we're looking into optimizing our infrastructure as well as Drupal. If you have thoughts or ideas, feel free to help at the infrastructure mailing list. That's where we swap ideas and get some of this work done.

uitek’s picture

uitek commented

At least, that is what gives me the most headaches. Fortunately mySQL allows you to distribute the task between multiple computers, if you have the hardware to spare that is. The drupal code itself is very quick, at least compared to anything else out there I have used.

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