This morning I received notice of two security update releases in my inbox: one about Drupal core being upgraded, another about the OpenID module containing a security vulnerability before 1.2.

Since upgrading Drupal core is such a pain, I've generated a patch (it's attached to this post: click on '1 attachment' to retrieve it) for upgrading your existing sites from 5.7. If you're not running a 5.7 site, please don't try to use it.

In my experience, there are three different categories of site slowdown and delay:

• Imperceptible
• Perceptible
• Unusable

Other distinctions really don't matter so much. The user doesn't care whether the page load latency is 10 seconds or 15 seconds. They're just going to leave.

The progression of a delay is:

Imperceptible -> Perceptible -> Unusable

Building upon Drupal because it's 'cheaper' is a very poor reason to build on Drupal. It may be cheaper in the end than hacking up some closed-source commercial CMS to include the functionality that Drupal provides in its core distribution. But there's at least one thing to keep in mind:

There are a few simple steps you can take to optimize Drupal. Drupal is a large, heavy system: every advantage counts.

This initial benchmark is taken without any of the variables which I'm going to test: css aggregation, mod_deflate, and apc.


ab -n100 http://drupal.shadowlife.ca/drupal-5.7/


Connection Times (ms)
min mean[+/-sd] median max
Connect: 0 0 0.0 0 0
Processing: 24 40 20.4 31 123
Waiting: 21 34 17.2 28 119
Total: 24 40 20.4 31 123