Large Company Software website
I am currently in the process of deciding to use Drupal (commerce) or not. At the moment i have develop a website for my company that, Manages stock, Manages company accounts (including credit limits), invoices, purchase ordering i even have a touchscreen picking section for our stock room that prints sticker to go on the items being picked.
I am fully aware that i could do all of this in Drupal. But my worry is, will it be to slow!
I am in the process of redeveloping the whole site as i started to develop it when i first became a PHP coder. It becomes a pain to add things (or debug) onto the website because of the way i coded it.
I have been playing around, with Drupal and my website. All my scripts run in under 1 second, including my bigger accounts scripts on my current site. I have been playing around with test data and when cached run very very quick! But the first time you visit the page it the page load times go above 1second.
These are some stats from winCachegrind
My current site when displaying all 1500 on one page takes 0.860 seconds
Drupal Commerce Loads 9 Products 1280ms !
I have a slight feeling that the loading time a of a page will be much bigger because of all the advanced features Drupal has.
I don’t want to go deep into development to find out the performance of my site is going to decrease, especially as we have 1500 authenticated users and anonymous users won’t be able to use the site until registered.
Comments
Performance is a problem in Drupal. Even more so because as soon as you add something to a cart a session cookie gets added, which voids simple caching strategies. As you know caching works the best the closer it is to the client.
Use an external cache, be it Nginx FastCGI/proxy cache, be it Varnish. Cache all things for anon users. Reduce the PHP processing, so that only clients that already started the checkout process use up resources. As a shameless plug, warm the cache using cache_warmer (shameless plug).