Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.It came out of the discussion at #2081873: Re-implement module disabling in a temporary/debugging capacity that is environment aware and explicit about risks to data integrity that there is need for Core to provide a way for performance intensive modules to "dial back" their most intensive behaviour when certain criteria are met.
Maybe this criteria is that an administrator has simply selected a setting on the Performance page, or it could be a more complex API that could be used to detect when traffic is spiking.
This is distinct from the "traditional" way of disabling modules that simply cripples them, potentially leading to data loss or over-zealous restriction of functionality. Modules implementing a "high performance" mode would still be enabled and expected to ensure data integrity, but they may avoid or re-schedule expensive tasks until the site is no longer in "high performance mode".
In essence, all modules would be expected to continue functioning normally while in "high performance mode", except that specific, performance intensive, non-critical behaviour can be "dialled back" by the module maintainer in a way that won't cause unexpected issues later.
It's understood that "high performance mode" is only ever intended as a temporary state - presumably the performance intensive tasks performed by these modules will need to be done *eventually* if full site functionality is to be maintained longer term.
The use-case is "Your site's about to be mentioned on Oprah, so turn off the fantabulous tag generator feature until after the traffic dies down."
A few ideas for what could be implemented by core to allow a centralised "high performance mode":
- Cron tasks can indicate that they should not run in "high performance mode"
- A simple drupal_is_performance_mode() function to return TRUE/FALSE so modules can wrap internal code
- Hooks to be triggered as a site enters and leaves "high performance mode"
- Automatic expiry of "high performance mode", eg. the UI option provides a dropdown - put site in "high performance mode" for: 5, 30, 60, 90, 120 minutes... etc...
Comments
Comment #1
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedComment #2
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedComment #3
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedFrom Sun - https://drupal.org/comment/8438771#comment-8438771
Comment #4
catchSounds a lot like throttle module #245504: Remove throttle module again.
Comment #5
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedDidn't throttle work by disabling modules?
The proposal largely targets cron jobs or other "background tasks" rather than aiming to do things that might mess with caching for user-facing page loads (one of the quotes reasons throttle was removed).
Comment #6
catchThrottle worked on both entire modules and blocks. - i.e. you could set one specific block to be throttled if you wanted. I was mainly being nostalgic.
Being able to disable some background tasks - cron, things like notifications/mail queues etc. seems like a decent idea. Main concern would be a backlog that it's not possible to catch up on.
Comment #7
thedavidmeister CreditAttribution: thedavidmeister commentedIndeed. I suppose you wouldn't use this feature if your site was at risk of being put in this situation.
Comment #14
SKAUGHT