does flexinode scale?

I'd like to find out the answer to this (e.g. I'm hoping that someone who knows far more about the module than me will answer), as it seems to me that the combination of flexinode, fleximax, and flexisearch modules provides the non-code/PHP savvy user with many of the features that they would otherwise have to write their own modules to achieve.

My only question with taking this approach to a potentially busy Drupal site would be the same as dado's ... will it scale?

I would also appreciate an answer to this question. The most valuable form of an answer would be something like this: "without caching, relative to basic text nodes like story or page, flexinode pages with 8 or 10 fields of various types requires 50% more resources." Or perhaps, "without page caching, we have been able to serve about twice as many basic text nodes per minute as flexinode pages with 8 or ten fields." It is important to know a) if caching is on, b) how many flexinode fields and c) relative performance to other nodes on the same server. As you point out, the total node count can also affect performance.... Finally, it would ALSO be very interesting to know how caching affect flexinode performance. If flexinode pages are cached like simple text nodes, there should be NO DIFFERENCE in performance. Is that right???

I'm on the verge of changing, after two years, my basic node type from the default 'story' to a custom flexinode. And I have precisely this question. Dries? Anyone?

To retain linebreaks, etc., each field seems to need to be checked against filters before being displayed in my flexi theme. (Because I didn't want field labels showing, among other reasons, my theme displays the content up by field, rather than $content.) Does this ruin any benefits from caching?

Does a site that generates 15-20 new nodes a day face imminent disaster a year or so down the line?

I don't have numbers, but the flexinode queries generate at least one INNER JOIN per field, and there is a limit to how many MySQL can handle. If you compared a custom node type (with the fields stored in a dedicated relational table) to a flexinode with the same fields, the custom node type would far outperform the flexinode.

- Robert Douglass

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