Gadzooks! 197 queries in 2000 ms!

My site on Dreamhost has been a dog lately, taking anywhere from 4-20 seconds to render a single page. I turned on the query log in the devel module and was astounded!

197 sql queries??? For a single page???? With only 6 nodes and 5 blocks????

I come from an old school. Learned Foxpro back in the DOS days when a single SQL query was hashed over and streamlined as much as possible.

Yes, computers have gotten faster, but 197 queries???? For a single page??? I fear programmers have gotten a bit lazy, with the speed of current computers and all.

The problem with Dreamhost is that their mysql performance is abysmal, so when you've got 197 queries on a page, their weakness is exposed.

I may have to change providers. I'm thinking Site5, because their mysql performance seems to be much faster, at least according to several posters here.

However, if the Drupal Core programmers want an ambitious goal for Drupal 6, they should look at ways to combine some of those queries together! Just perusing the list, it looks as if 70-80% of those queries are redundant. (at least redundant in the sense of the data they are extracting)

This explains to me why Drupal sites always seem to take several seconds to display the first page. All these queries must be initialized. After the first pass at a query, much of the query data is in the mysql cache, so subsequent queries run faster. Unless, of course, you are sharing your mysql server with many other clients, whose own pages keep flushing the queue.

ISP's these days are offering insane amounts of disk storage. It might be better for Drupal if the programmers would "un-normalize" some of the data, in order to reduce the number of queries, in exchange for the tables taking up more space. But space is cheap and static, and the needs for it don't change that much as the number of users goes up.

However, BANDWIDTH does matter, and that's what most shared clients end up getting charged for in the end. I say, sacrifice disk space to gain a reduction in bandwidth.

Just an old fogey's opinion........