Re: [PERFORM] Drupal and PostgreSQL - performance issues?

On Mon, Oct 13, 2008 at 11:57 AM, Mikkel Høgh <mikkel(at)hoegh(dot)org> wrote:

> In any case, if anyone has any tips, input, etc. on how best to configure
> PostgreSQL for Drupal, or can find a way to poke holes in my analysis, I
> would love to hear your insights :)

It'd be more accurate to configure Drupal for PostgreSQL. We use
PostgreSQL for almost everything, including many drupal sites, but the
usage pattern of Drupal puts PostgreSQL at a disadvantage. In short,
Drupal issues a lot of small, simple SQL (100+ is the norm), that
makes tuning hard. To make it faster, you'd need to turn on Drupal's
caches (and PHP opcode caches) to reduce the number of SQLs issued. To
get even better numbers, you'd need to get Drupal to use memcached
instead of calling PostgreSQL for the simple lookups. You can use the
devel module in Drupal to have a look at the SQLs issued. Not pretty,
IMHO.

See: http://2bits.com/articles/benchmarking-postgresql-vs-mysql-performance-using-drupal-5x.html
http://2bits.com/articles/advcache-and-memcached-benchmarks-with-drupal.html

The most promising Drupal performance module for performance looks
like: http://drupal.org/project/cacherouter (900 req/s!) but I haven't
got the chance to give it a go yet.

I'm a die-hard PostgreSQL and Drupal supporter, but in this case, I
concede straight up Drupal+MySQL will always be faster than
Drupal+PostgreSQL because of the way Drupal uses the database. We
still use PostgreSQL for our Drupal sites though, because while it's
slower, it's plenty fast enough.