Drupal 7

Submitted by Peter on Mon, 2011-01-03 00:00

Drupal:

Drupal 7 is the perfect content management system for developing new Web sites. Compared to Drupal 6, Drupal 7 has some great leaps forward, some annoyances, and is ready for module developers who want to create Drupal 7 versions of their modules. Drupal 7 can be used to build a new site that is not dependent on a lot of obscure add-on modules.

Performance

Parts of Drupal 7 are slower than the equivalent in Drupal 6 while other parts are faster. There are theoretical reasons why some parts of Drupal 7 should be a little bit faster but they are overshadowed by people talking about the slower bits. Some people will not notice the performance difference because it depends on the options you use and the way people access your site. When you convert your Web site to Drupal 7, you will probably use the opportunity to add extra features and those extra features will increase the overhead so make your new Web server bigger and faster.

There are several design mistakes in Drupal 6 that are fixed in Drupal 7 and will produce better performance. They are in optional areas you hit only with specific combinations of modules and options. The important difference is the extent of the performance tuning compared to previous releases. Drupal 4 had some odd contributions to performance including a few suggestions I supplied to module developers. Drupal 5 had wider ranging SQL improvements including improvements I supplied for the combinations of modules and options used in my sites. Drupal 6 has formal performance tests for the core modules. Drupal 7 includes more modules in the core distribution and the performance testing covers the additional modules.

At this stage Drupal 7 used on an average site should use slightly less database resources but more processor power. The excess database accesses are easily spotted and removed. The extra processing is harder to remove because some of it is needed to provide new features. Processing costs drop faster than any amount you save through tuning. Enjoy the new features and be prepared to buy more processing power if you use all the new features.

Tokens

Token is a useful optional Drupal 6 module that is included in Drupal 7 core as standard. Token adds a processing overhead to find tokens. When Token was optional, module developers did not use token processing unless they really needed it and used it only on node types requiring the processing. Now that Token is a standard part of Drupal, module developers may rush in to use tokens everywhere for every node type and your processing overhead may creep up.

Database cache

Drupal caches processed pages for anonymous users. You control the degree of caching. You might not see a difference between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 for cached pages because the processing is similar. Use the contact form to ask me questions about using the Drupal cache options.

Logged in users receive uncached pages requiring greater processing overheads. Test with lots of users logged in or turn off page caching to emulate lots of logged in users. The overheads of delivering fresh pages to logged in users will be different between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7. The difference will depend on the options you choose.

Add-on modules

One of the things that makes Drupal so powerful is the range of free add-on modules. Some of the add-on modules are ready for Drupal 7. Some are not yet ready. Your conversion of an exiting site depends on the availability of the add-on modules you use. here are some popular add-on modules.