By System Lord on

I've been using Drupal for a year and love it. I'm nearly complete with a website and am excited to launch it. I haven't really had a big concern with using Drupal except for one thing. Is the drupal.org website any indication of how slow my site will be? Honestly, I'm pretty nervous about it. There are many many times I'm waiting more than two minutes for the drupal.org site to load, and I have a very fast internet connection. I expect my site to have many times the user volume and that kind of response time will kill my site instantly. So, what's the story with drupal's server configuration.

⋅ Categories: Drupal 7.x

Comments

Jaypan’s picture

Jaypan commented

I think the longest I ever wait for a page load on d.o. is maybe 10 seconds, and I think even that's a stretch. Most pages load between 1-2 seconds, and 5 would be long. I'd say the problem sounds more like an issue somewhere in between d.o. and your computer.

System Lord’s picture

System Lord commented

Thanks, Jaypan. It's a relief to know it could be just my environment. For the record I do see those load times as well, but many times I'm looking at two+ minutes. I guess I could use firebug to analyze the network.

John_B’s picture

John_B commented

As often discussed here (not only by me!) there is a lot of info in blog posts etc. on Drupal performance, and there is no escaping that it does require more from the hosting than many other ways of building a website. It is true that if you drop a large Drupal site on poor quality shared hosting or an entry-level VPS it can be very slow, and I have often seen the permissions page fail to save completely. You do need to think about performance, which covers both the quality and setup of the hosting, and some thought about how the site is put together. A frequent mistake is to keep adding modules and functionality, and to discover later than a large complex site can be a burden to host and manage. The simpler the better! Sometimes complexity is unavoidable, and for clients who need a complex site, one just has to explain that sophistication does of course come with extra maintenance and hosting costs, whichever CMS you pick. Just as we disable services to get Wndows XP running fast on low-cost hardware, I love to remove dispensible software from a Drupal site and pare it back to the minimum you need to keep those costs down.

Digit Professionals specialising in Drupal, WordPress & CiviCRM support for publishers in non-profit and related sectors