By Fifth_Column_Media on

Hello Drupal Forum,

I'm new to Drupal and the forum here, hopefully this is in the right forum section.

I've only been working with Drupal for about a month now, but I think it's great and really dig the flexibility it allows for in terms of site functionality.

I'm, currently working on doing a complete redesign and conversion of my site from Wordpress to Drupal, but I've been running into a problem with my current host. The site is still heavily in development so it's completely password protected and I'm the only developer so when I'm working on it there's only 1 user. I'm using Drupal 6 and have a fair number of modules installed, but nothing too insane though and I haven't modified the code or written any custom modules or anything like that. The site is currently hosted at Startlogic, but I'm strongly considering moving it to a more "Drupal friendly" host because of the problem I'm seeing.

Here's the problem:
If I'm on the site (again only 1 user), I can work for a good couple of hours adding content, editing menus, tweaking settings etc before I run into a Database Query limit error. The site then is completely inaccessible for a good 15-40 minutes. I posted the error with tech support at Startlogic and they told me I'm going over my 75,000 per hour database query limit.

I had this problem on another Startlogic site I administer and I know for a fact it was no where near that limit, so I kinda think they're crazy and the problem is with the server. Still I don't know Drupal that well, so my question is this:

Is it possible Drupal is actually making 75,000 database queries and I really am hitting this limit with only 1 user? It doesn't seem likely, but how many queries does an average Drupal install make per page load?

Thank you all in advance for any insight you can provide. It's greatly appreciated.

Take care,

D.A.N. (Dave)

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x

Comments

criznach’s picture

criznach commented

Drupal can easily do hundreds of queries per page request for logged in users. So 75000 per hour is not un-heard of. If you requested one page ever 10 seconds, and each page ran 200 queries, that is 72000. Try enabling the block cache, and disable any unnecessary modules. There are definitely limits on how complex a Drupal site can get before it outgrows shared hosting. Luckily, you can cut the queries down to just a few per page for anonymous traffic.

http://www.trailheadinteractive.com

Fifth_Column_Media’s picture

Fifth_Column_Media commented

Interesting, thanks criznach. I appreciate the insight.

Luckily this site will have 99% of the traffic be anonymous so that bodes well for me. I will look into caching (I actually was already) to help ease the load. I definitely don't like that limit looming over me though.

It might be time for me to ditch Startlogic anyways. I've read a lot of the threads here about good hosting for Drupal, along with a ton of reviews from users and "professionals", plus plenty of host-bashing pages, and it seems like I might get better performance elsewhere. Any host recommendations are welcome, as are any specific criteria to consider for Drupal in regards to hosting that I might not have already seen on some of the threads and pages here. So far I'm leaning towards Hostgator.

Thanks again.

Dave