performance

I was talking about SCF and Drupal yesterday with someone I'm working with on another project, and he said he finds Drupal difficult to scale. He thinks that it's not capable of handling more than 100 users. If that's true, that would be a major concern for [our project]. What has been your experience regarding scaling issues with Drupal?

My first response to that was in internet-speak: LOL.

Then I recovered my professional self:

One issue is that in Drupal 5x the i18n_node table does not have indexes where you really need them.

See the CivicActions post When to Index - Databases, Tables, Explain.

Resolution

As a module developer who loves to make configuration options, I feel guilty every time I make one more variable_get() that's going to make yet another call to the database.

Proposed solution: every module we make (say, performance_enhancer.module) can have a configuration file (performance_enhancer.config) in it.

If that configuration file is copied to files/config (in wherever your files directory is located), that copy is used instead. (file_exists seems pretty fast.)

Does this make any sense to people?