Drupal Perfomance

Question

I am creating a website with Drupal, where users will upload various content. I want to scale Drupal at the rate the site is growing on. I will have more than 45,000 nodes and over 1,000,000 comments on the site.

This is a multi-site installation. I was wondering if I should use the Pathauto module to alias node paths and tags paths or use the following code for taxonomy.

function site_function_term_path($term) {
  $t = taxonomy_get_term($term->tid);
  $term->name = $t->name;
  return 'tags/' . urlencode($term->name);
}

Which is better way to implement this?

Answer 1

Since you still need to generate path aliases for nodes, I would rather use the Pathauto module. The code you show has the following problems:

• It doesn't work for Drupal 7, since hook_term_path() is not used from Drupal 7

• It works only when the module handling the vocabulary is not the Taxonomy module, since the hook is invoked from the following function.

  function taxonomy_term_path($term) {
    $vocabulary = taxonomy_vocabulary_load($term->vid);
    if ($vocabulary->module != 'taxonomy' && $path = module_invoke($vocabulary->module, 'term_path', $term)) {
      return $path;
    }
    return 'taxonomy/term/' . $term->tid;
  }
  

• There should not be the need of calling taxonomy_get_term() since the taxonomy term object is already passed to the hook.

A Drupal 7 solution would be implementing hook_url_inbound_alter() and hook_url_outbound_alter(), for which the equivalent in Drupal 6 are two functions to add to the settings.php file: custom_url_rewrite_inbound() and custom_url_rewrite_outbound().

As for when that hooks/functions should be used instead of using path aliases with the Pathauto module, you can look at What is the difference between implementing hook_url_inbound_alter() and hook_url_outbound_alter(), and using a path alias?

Using hook_url_outbound_alter() has some potential performance issues because it is executed by every single URL on a page via the url() function. This means a module could implement hook_url_outbound_alter() with some complex and slow code that is called 100's of times per page.

Also hook_url_outbound_alter() allows a link's $options, including its query string, to be altered, which is impossible to do to path aliases and a very useful feature. For example, I have altered internal RSS URLs to point to their respective Feedburner and iTunes URLs.

Conceptually, the Path module should be calling the hook_url_*_alter() hooks but it is probably slightly faster to have the drupal_get_path_alias() calls directly in url().