Speeding up Drupal on Vista with Wampserver

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

The problem : Drupal awfully slow on Vista (and Seven) with Wampserver

For some time now, I'd been severiously annoyed by the (utter lack of) performance of Drupal 6 and 7 on my home PC, which happens to be running Microsoft Vista: considering I was used to getting page times around 200ms on a fractional Celeron with Apache 2.2 on a Linux server hosted comparatively far across the net from that same machine, I felt the 5 to 15 seconds response time per page on this local machine with a quad core and 3 GB RAM were really making me lose my time.

The solution

After some time spend googling around, I stumbled upon an incredibly simple tip, which made the 5 to 15 seconds per page drop down to around 1 second when logged in, and well below 500 ms when not logged in. It's incredible what ONE single character in a plain text file gets you under Vista :-)

UPDATE 2010-01-23: David Hogg tells us (see below) that this works for Windows Seven too

GroupWise 8 is here at last

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

So at long last, GW8 is becoming reality :

See the GW8 announcement on Novell communities.

As a long time developer on GroupWise (hey, I did this even before I started on Drupal !), I'm glad to see the product evolve. And already a planned upgrade for a customer :-)

Now, if I could find a project merging both... to this day, I've only used Delphi, both with OLE and SOAP, to communicate with GW.

When Trac "Available projects" starts as an empty page

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Having to use Trac instead of our usual Drupal Project* setup for a new Drupal project, I just found out a problem which perplexed me for a moment: after following the instructions from the Trac site for a very basic setup, without SVN integration, all seems to work well, up to the point where I started the server.

# tracd --port 8000 /var/www/trac/proj1

The problem

... and went to my browser to http://www.example.com:8000/ only to receive an almost empty page, just saying "Available Projects" and nothing else. No error during trac-admin initenv. And the page was well-formed, showing it was likely not an actual bug.

Googling around the problem showed the issue to be already known, but offered no hint about the solution. What could be wrong ?

If the SELECT in your Drupal modules are suddenly all 4 lines high or more...

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

If all of a sudden you notice that the SELECT elements in your Drupal forms increases to 4 and any smaller size is ignored...

... maybe you've already forgotten you were using Chrome, and it is not a Drupal bug : this is a "usability" feature of WebKit. See http://trac.webkit.org/browser/trunk/WebCore/rendering/RenderListBox.cpp#L67.

Safari users are probably used to it, but for users of other browsers, this is a bit disconcerting.

Reducing system load for graphical widgets

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Using a graphics library, be GD, ImageMagick or anything else, is convenient, but carries a price to pay: unlike most Drupal parts, which are generally database-bound, image generation is typically CPU-bound: generating many images on the fly can significantly increase the CPU load on a system, while Drupal setups are typically not optimized for this, and could result in problems if you are using Drupal on a shared hosting account. So what ?

A progress bar widget for FormsAPI

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Forms API progress barAs a Drupal user, you certainly noticed that update.php displays a nice progress bar to make you wait during its batch operations. And maybe you also noticed theme_progress_bar in the API reference.

The question

Wouldn't it be nice to have that progress bar available as an extended version of markup that would graphically display a value in your forms without stuffing it in a markup element ?

Checkboxes in forms step by step

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

For some reason or another, I've noticed several new Drupal developers these last few days sweating on Forms API, and thought it would be nice to have a smallish example to complement the unavoidable FAPI reference and Guick start guide, for a typical non-basic form: one including set of checkboxes in a table, with a customized display, like the core user, content or modules administration forms. So follow me while we build this example.

Grokking Drupal: module dependencies in e-Commerce 4

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

Roughly two years ago, I prepared a diagram of the dependencies in the then-current version of Drupal e-Commerce (eC) for Drupal 4.6.

Dependency diagram for Drupal e-Commerce 4 Now, with other eC projects looming ahead, a possible session about eC at Szeged, and eC 4 being in alpha, I figured it was time to update the model. Boy, has it changed ! Click the thumbnail for the full-size view.

e-Commerce sessions in Szeged

Submitted by Frederic Marand on

If you are [considering] working on an e-Commerce site, and are coming to the Szeged Drupalcon, you may be interested in several sessions around the theme. In order for your session(s) of choice to stand a chance of being actually part of the conference program, you should vote for the sessions you would like to attend.

Subjet to approval by the conference board, I will be animating/presenting a session about the internals of the e-Commerce suite: see http://szeged2008.drupalcon.org/program/sessions/developing-e-commerce for more details. If this is of interest to you, vote on the session to make sure it will indeed be included in the conference program.