By iandit on

Hello All,

Has anybody done any scalability tests of Drupal being accessed through dialup speeds? With a fresh install of 4.72 I seem to have a very noticeable lag in page load. No template changes, only one "test" page created but still the site takes a very long while to load up. Does this mean Drupal is not made for third world users? I was planning to use it for a huge organisation with target users not using high speeds. Any recommendations, experiences?

Thanks,

⋅ Categories: Drupal 4.7.x

Comments

dman’s picture

dman commented

If the same content - the same theme and the same actual HTML is being sent down the pipe, then the Drupal version won't be making any difference in regards to bandwidth problems.

An updated version may make a difference to server load, although hopefully in a good way, and this may be seen in full performance stats - but that's not a bandwidth issue.

a recent discussion on bandwidth vs performance explains some of the differences.

Optimizing for dial-up users means stripping down your code and images. Serving from a CMS, ASP or flat files makes no difference at that end.
OTOH, If your server is struggling to keep up with demand, then all users of any connection will be seeing the problems, and dial-ups will not be specifically disadvantaged any more than the rest.

I think you're asking the wrong question. Scalability and bandwidth are not measured on the same charts. (unless you are talking about the size of the pipe leading from the server itself to the net)

.dan.
http://www.coders.co.nz/

.dan. is the New Zealand Drupal Developer working on Government Web Standards

iandit’s picture

iandit commented

Thanks Dan,

I get your points properly and I guess my question is not as clear as it should.

I just did a speed test and my connection sits around 3.4k/sec. Which is (after you've been working on cable and DSL for a while) quite the torture. So no wonder any browsing seems slow.

My question is geared more towards the performance of Drupal than the actual bandwidth. And more so towards the stripping of code and modules to minimise querries and hook loads. For a regular user the difference between latency in performance and bandwidth is unclear. And my goal is to optimise performance to minimize as much as possible overall latency.

I have used Drupal on many sites but this specific issue has never come to the table. In this case I'm promoting open source in an orgnisation filled with Microsoft products and I chose Drupal for the website. I've had pressure to use ASP .NET for the site but remained stubborn on the issue. I guess you can say I'm slightly worried about long term impacts and so on as the site grows.

Would you consider Drupal a fast CMS?
Is caching an effective way to make loading faster?

Thanks,

firstov’s picture

firstov commented

iandit, this all depends on what hardware you are going to run the site.
Put some load balancer / caching content switch in front of your web heads and make sure your database server is tuned properly / fast enough to support your requirements. Then use some php optimizer (like the one used on this site) and you'll be able to support as many users as needed.

Now if you talking about shared hosting, that's another story: In this case the databases there are usually very slow and since drupal relies heavily on the database your site will be somewhat slow. I've seen somebody posted a patch to allow drupal file caching to speed things up just for this case.

P.S. It'll be nice if someone actually collect all drupal optimizing tips and posted it somewhere in one place...

James Andres’s picture

James Andres commented

Hi landit,

If I understand your situation correctly, your hoping to get faster response times from Drupal for clients with dial up.

This problem is almost entirely in the templating design. There are two issues with dial-up:

  1. Fancy pages take a long time to download. Solution: use a very minimal theme / template.
  2. Dial-up users maintain long drawn-out connections, wasting your server resources. Solution: try using a reverse proxy to offload static content to another webserver (ie: lighttpd). This will let slow clients tie up the lighttpd server and leave apache free to server new clients.

Hopefully that's on-topic with your question.

James Andres

Lead Developer on Project Opus
www.projectopus.com

Blacki-1’s picture

Blacki-1 commented

If you intend on serving dial-up users just keep it simple, try to find that comprimise between looks and performance.
I found the largest gains with optimising my images, the rest of the site loaded like a shot. (on dial-up)

James' solutions sounds spot-on, if your pc is still having trouble serving there is also the option of running the site on a linux distro with clustering and using a few more pc's...

vlvtelvis’s picture

vlvtelvis commented

I don't know about drupal specifically, but I've found that I've found that even conservative php zlib output compression can help quite a bit in this area with most text heavy dynamic content.