Alligatorsneeze

I wrote this back in June when I was knee deep in attempting to optimize a Drupal 5 website that was receiving a lot of traffic and showing very poor performance. This article is incomplete and I don't really come up with any solid solutions here, but thought this may be of some help nonetheless.

Performance of any site is a concern when you start getting actual traffic. Drupal performance can be even trickier, as it often likes to hog up server resources especially when you have a lot of modules enabled.

Often the issue lies with mySQL. While I like mySQL, configuring for optimal performance doesn't always come easy. One issue that can often occur is a large number of temporary tables being written to disk. What we want is for these tables to be written to memory. A good article which discusses the overhead of mySQL writing to disk can be found here at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2007/08/16/how-much-overhead-is-caus...

Essentially, it says MEMORY temporary tables can be 10-100 times faster than disk based MyISAM tables . That's quite a difference.

I started two or three weeks ago tweaking our mySQL configuration and performance on a site that was getting 85% or more of it's temp tables written to disk. Today, we're getting between 6-10%. There's still work to do, but the increase has been awesome and very noticeable in the speed of the site.

This is a pretty simple task but one I seem to end up doing over and over again for whatever project I'm working on at the time. I've done it a number of ways, from simply using CSS and dealing with multiple cross-browser issues, and probably quite a few alterations of this technique.

EDIT: chx pointed out I was doing this all wrong and wouldn't work when dealing with multiple submit buttons. Looking at the views_ui.module, there's a proper way to do this. See below:

Note: Not posting this to Drupal planet as it's not really that interesting for most people.

End of day three of Drupalcon Boston 2008. It's been fun, stressful, exhausting, interesting, insightful and I'm incredibly mentally and physically exhausted! I feel like I could sleep for days. I actually did oversleep this morning after a late night over at FELT, the awesome gathering Acquia threw. I was sad to miss the Simpletest session.

So... recap of my day yesterday. I went to the Future of Fields session which was really insightful, but I couldn't get my wireless working during it which tends to make me impatient.

Went to the Google in Open Source session since my wireless wasn't working. It was entertaining, which is always good.

I meant to post this last night but the wifi sucks at the hotel (Royal Sonesta) and I gave up. Here's a recap of my day yesterday, first impressions, general thoughts. Not a whole lot of info on the sessions because I missed a lot of them attempting to get some work done.

This is my first Drupalcon and I've been really looking forward to it for months. So far, I'm mostly star struck. There are a lot of people I know of and recognize from the Drupal community, people I've chatted with on IRC, co-workers I'm meeting for the first time. It's a bit overwhelming, but pretty fun.

My first session of the day was the Usability one which is something I am interested in with Drupal 7. I've been doing some of my own usability testing and hope to publish those results soon. Some interesting tidbits I got away from that session:

• Content in Drupal is really, really confusing. None of the participants seemed to get it.

This took me a little bit of poking around to figure out, so here's a quick tip in case others are attempting to do the same thing.

For some CCK select options, you want it to both be required and to also not default on the first answer because a user might click through without changing the default without meaning to. There is the Default value options you can play with, but the easiest way I've found is in your Allowed values list you can simply enter this as your first choice:

This will give you the -Please Choose- as a default, but if the user doesn't switch it, an error will come up. The reason for this is it's expecting you to have your answer in a format such as 1|Option 1, with the "machine" or "key" name first, followed by a pipe, and then the name of the option a user will see. If you don't give it a machine name it simply isn't valid.

While I've built oven a dozen Drupal-based websites spanning almost 2 years, my contact with e-commerce within Drupal has been limited. Two of my latest projects brought me face to face with a need for e-commerce, though, and while I toyed with the idea of using ZenCart once again, after installing it and relearning how to work with it, I immediately uninstalled it and turned back to Drupal.

Faced with two choices, Ubercart and the e-Commerce modules, I was left a bit bewildered. Back when Drupal was still in 4.6, I used e-Commerce for a website where users were rewarded with points via the Userpoints module, and with these points were able to purchase items using E-commerce. It worked well but because it was when I was still very new to Drupal, I remembered it being cumbersome, difficult to configure, and just a big headache, and that was without needing an actual merchant account or payment gateway.