Hi all,

Im moving into drupal 7 from a year and so and several themes made for drupal 6 using my own framework. I've always been worried about performance, and I have heard all this time that preprocessing is one of the heaviest parts when accessing the site. I also know that drupal has a lot of issues with html code and have been looking for something similar to what this theme gives: reduced, semantic code.

Now having said that, I see the template.php and all the overrides and I want to ask: isnt all this too heavy? are we gaining in performance in frontend but loosing in server load? Isnt it lighter for the system to use what it has and for us to target what we need, through CSS?

These are legitimate questions I've been having. I like the philosophy behind this theme and I'm planning to use it as some sort of framework, but I wanted to ask from a performance point of view.

Any comments will be greatly appreciated.

Comments

mortendk’s picture

mortendk commented

To be dead honest i havent really tested this from a performance view.
Basically based on the fact that "everything is gonna get cached anyway" and that there isn't any real magick going on in the template.php
Just plain template overrides & a little bit of fiddeling with the classes_array

So if you running without cache, apc etc then i would guess you would have totally other issues with performance like the gazillion db calls & other fun

I have no idea of when were gonna look into performance optimization, this havent really been an issue so far. So my bet is that its running pretty slick ;)

betovarg’s picture

betovarg
he/him
Primary language Spanish
Location San José
commented

Hi! and thanx for the response. I've been involved in serveral high traffic sites, performance always worries me. My main concern is running a site on a shared hosting: with drupal 6 you could have several cache layers even in a piece of crap hosting (put on some boost and authcache, and cache router helps you do the magic), not so in drupal 7 (boost well, works, cache router is not gonna be migrated, so no auth cache).

I have been thinking about testing a subtheme (already made one, mothership works EXCELLENT as a base theme!) on a site and running an AB and see what that tells me. Actually been asking several server guys if they know a way to test theme performance, but mostly he answer is a rinning a benchmark test.

So, i'll try to run the test on a server this week. My concern is on the number of overwritten templates, its the preprocess in template.php.

mortendk’s picture

mortendk commented

cool let me know how it goes and if we can make it quicker n better :)

mortendk’s picture

mortendk commented

cool let me know how it goes and if we can make it quicker n better :)

betovarg’s picture

betovarg
he/him
Primary language Spanish
Location San José
commented

Hi, so obviously did not run the tests on time. Now, I have ran some in a simple site, and well, looking pretty well.

Mothership

Benchmarking 192.168.5.110 (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.0.63
Server Hostname:        192.168.5.110
Server Port:            8888

Document Path:          /site
Document Length:        339 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   1.112 seconds
Complete requests:      50
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      50
Total transferred:      33050 bytes
HTML transferred:       16950 bytes
Requests per second:    44.98 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       22.231 [ms] (mean)
  99%     29
 100%     29 (longest request)

Bartik

Benchmarking 192.168.5.110 (be patient).....done


Server Software:        Apache/2.0.63
Server Hostname:        192.168.5.110
Server Port:            8888

Document Path:          /site
Document Length:        339 bytes

Concurrency Level:      1
Time taken for tests:   1.868 seconds
Complete requests:      50
Failed requests:        0
Write errors:           0
Non-2xx responses:      50
Total transferred:      33050 bytes
HTML transferred:       16950 bytes
Requests per second:    26.76 [#/sec] (mean)
Time per request:       37.365 [ms] (mean)
  99%    741
 100%    741 (longest request)

This was a simple test done on a small site, frontpage with views slideshow, and several blocks showing, including the menu.

Mothership:
Requests per second: 44.98 [#/sec] (mean)

Bartik:
Requests per second: 26.76 [#/sec] (mean)

Ran it a few times and even on nodes and I got almost the same result. So, basically we're good if we are caching stuff, which of course, we MUST.

mortendk’s picture

mortendk commented

thanx for the test !
yup mothership is basically rewriting everything it can get a hold on - and running a drupal site without caching stuff is not a thing anybody does now is it ;)

betovarg’s picture

betovarg
he/him
Primary language Spanish
Location San José
commented
Status: Active » Closed (fixed)