Drupal 6 more efficient that 5?

Hi All,

First of all apologies for always asking questions about 'possible' negative aspects of Drupal - I'd really like to use Drupal but I have concerns, hence the questions.. I hope you don't mind me asking.

Anyway, one of the things I hear people say about Drupal is that it is quite a resource hog, especially when people are logged in.

Is this true? And if it was with 5, have these things been ironed out in 6?

Unfortunately I can't spend squllions on multiple dedicated servers for relatively low traffic. I currently run a few sites that combined, serve well over 2 millions pages a month off a modest server (AMD Barton 3000 and 2GB ram normal HD) and it does not even break into a sweat. The sites are all powered by vBulletin and I try not to use 'hacks' wherever possible. Also, we don't serve or host that many attachments - most people just hotlink from a photohost. Up to around 600 users online at once with maybe 40% ish being logged in.

My next site could be even busier and I'm just really worried about going with Drupal (even though I really want to!). The site will be similar to a newspaper site - one where logged in users can comment on almost all published stories.

On the other hand I see that a lot of big sites use Drupal and manage just fine - but many of them are businesess that either supplement the running of the site or possibly have teams devoted to getting ad revenue (my sites are more a labour of love than a business!).

Something that adds to me worrying about this is witnessing the speed of sites like this.. they just seem sluggish compared to even the most busiest of vB forums.

Again apologies for bringing up any negatives but I really do need some reassurance from you guys.

Cheers,