Re: Drupal and PostgreSQL - performance issues?

On 14/10/2008, at 20.23, Daniel Verite wrote:
> What I've noticed on drupal-6.4 with Ubuntu 8.04 is that the default
> postgresql.conf has:
> ssl=true
> and since drupal doesn't allow connecting to pgsql with unix socket
> paths [1], what you get by default is probably TCP + SSL encryption.
> A crude test that just connects and disconnect to a local pg server
> appears to me to be 18 times faster when SSL is off.
> So you might want to check if setting ssl to false makes a
> difference for your test.

Ouch, there's a gotcha. So enabling SSL gives you SSL connections by
default, even for localhost? That’s… unexpected.

> [1] A patch has been posted here: http://drupal.org/node/26836 , but
> it seems to have gotten nowhere. The comments about pg_connect() are
> depressingly lame, apparently nobody had a clue how unix socket
> files should be specified, including the contributor of the patch!

Well, I suppose no one thought about looking at a specific path
instead of just the default location. That's what we do for MySQL as
well. I suppose that is a bit silly, but that, too, is going away in
Drupal 7 (and I won't miss it). It will do the Drupal project a lot of
good not having to maintain its own database abstraction system.

I'm going to run the test again without SSL to see how much difference
it does. Thanks for the tip.