Drupal loading slow, caused by Update module

I've found the following explanations: it's due to automatic updates when there is no internet access

http://www.dezinedepot.com/news/drupal_news?page=1
Slow on administer pages

How to turn it off?

Drupal 6.0rc4 is far from current, and I could not reproduce the bug on the current version (6.1). Please try upgrading, and let us know if it fixes the issue.

Susan

Also, could you be using Vista? There is a very similar-looking bug that sometimes manifests on localhost vista installations due to some peculiarity with the Vista IPv6 implementation. There's an issue about it somewhere.

Trying out drupal 6.2 for the first time and experiencing extremely slow load times; a minute and half to load a page or sometimes it would just time out. Have lots of 5.x sites installed and running fine. One post suggested it was the "check for updates" feature -- still can't figure out where this setting is stored after the initial install. Anyway, I prefer to run the contents of .htaccess in the virtual host configuration. So I moved .htaccess out of document root, and the performance became normal. The module admin page is still loading slowly, but perhaps this is the "check for updates" feature.

I can add at least one additional clue to my previous post. On a hunch I've installed two copies of drupal 6.2, one with mysql, the other with postgres. Again, I have multiple drupal installs from 4.x to 5.latest running on both mysql or postgres. These two installs of drupal 6.2 are running on the same server using only core modules and are otherwise configured identically. So the hardware and software are consistent, only the version of drupal has changed. I can report a significant performance difference between mysql and postgres on drupal 6.2 -- the site using postgres took 1 minute 49 seconds to load the admin/build/modules page, whereas the site using mysql took about 7 seconds. As I prefer postgres to mysql, I have a number of drupal sites installed using postgres. This is the first time I've seen a performance problem, much less one of this magnitude.

Yes, you're a genius! When I removed .htaccess performance jumped to the same level as Drupal 5.7
Someone should find out why as I am just playing on localhost but when I deploy I certainly want .htaccess active

So far, I have not been able to fix the problem on my Vista laptop by doing any of the following (some of which have been reported as working for others):
- renaming .htaccess to .htaccess.bak.txt
- editing \windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to insert a '#' before the '::1' (note: I needed to be in "Safe Mode with Command Prompt" to edit the file)
- using "127.0.0.1" rather than "localhost" in the path
- using "Intranet Settings" in Internet Explorer

Note that the problem didn't appear:
- on my XP desktop, using the exact same version of 6.2
- on my Vista laptop (Dell Inspiron 6.2) before I reformatted the drive (which was experiencing errors) and got the latest drivers from Dell
- when installing 5.7 on the Vista laptop

See also:

http://drupal.org/node/222808

Any more status on this? I've installed Acquia Drupal on Vista and it is running PAINFULLY slow.

Hi Mike,

Have you by any chance tried:

added a "# " before the line "::1" in c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts to force vista to use the IPv4 mapping for localhost. This worked for me, and solved the issue in both IE and FF. Things are working very snappy now.

This comes from the thread linked in #10 here. It seems there are issues with the way Vista implements IPv6 when addressing localhost.

Thanks
Josh

Acquia Technical Assistance Center

I had a problem where the administration menu was veeerry slow. After reading comments in various forums I decided to simply rename the file C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal\modules\update to C:\xampp\htdocs\drupal\modules/donotupdate. He presto! The menu now works like lightning! Worth a shot.

Closing this issue because of a lack of activity.

Many people, including myself have experienced that Drupal became slower and slower when accessing admin pages, sometimes taking 40-60 seconds to load. I tried tinkering with the MySQL settings, and php.ini, nothing helped, but when I turned off the Update module, the admin pages loaded way faster, like in a second.

Of course, having to turn off the Update module isn't an optimal solution. Perhaps, to just run it once a day, we could set a flag in the database ("update_has_run") to "True", to check if it has run, so that only one page view per day will take 40-60 seconds?

Other users who have found the Update module is the bottleneck:
http://drupal.org/node/220278
http://drupal.org/node/260529
http://drupal.org/node/291378
http://drupal.org/node/369145
http://drupal.org/node/379196

Please understand I am trying to help you, not make things worse.

Without a patch from someone experiencing this issue (works fine for me), this issue will never get solved.

Have you ever tried putting watchdog() statements within the update module and tried to find out where it is slow?

Some might say what you are suggesting is good but it could be called a "feature request" of which none are being accepted for D6. In that case, you would have to apply a patch against D8. If the issue exists there.

I hope you find a solution for your problem.

You know what, Drupal doesn't slow down to a crawl any longer when I am on administer pages, even WITH the Update module enabled. Perhaps disabling and enabling the module fixed something, or flushed out some left over settings in the database?

Whatever fixed it I am very glad I don't have to wait. And if it returns again I know where to look first, before messing with MySQL and Apache settings 8o)

Glad it is working now.