We all know that flexinode is a nice module, providing a lot of site admin flexibility with no need for programming.

Two objections to flexinode are :

1. It will eventually be replaced by CCK (content module?) in 4.8 or later (what is the current estimate on this anyways?)

2. Because it has to use multi-way joins, it can be resource expensive on a busy site. This is why sites like BuyBlue and ProjectOpus did not use flexinode.

On the other hand, the recent addition of the flexisearch module (thanks Dub!) makes flexinode more attractive, and opens new possibilities.

My question here is how large a site can flexinode handle (number of nodes, number of page views per month)?

If you know of such sites, please share what you know.

Comments

kae’s picture

Khalid,
thank you for this info. I was not aware of this and have been relying on flexinode. I did a brief search of this site and found one thread discussing a site using flexinode that suggested images are the big problem.

Do you have any articles/links I can read about flexinode being a problem on busy sites, and that's why buyblue and projectopus don't use them? I may need to rethink the strategy if flexinode is a big problem.

thank you very much,
ae2005

keizo’s picture

I am about to use flexinode, but these were also concerns of mine. I think I'm too far in to not use flexinode at this point, and it would take too much time to create the necessary modules.

My question is, has anyone converted flexinode content to custom modules? How hard would this be once that kind of scale is needed?

greggles’s picture

I have a hard time imagining that it would be harder than just hand-coding it from the beginning...

Especially since the hardest part (IMO) is the "what should it look like" part which Flexinode would give you very easily.

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Wanderlusting Travelers
Knaddison Family

thinkinkless’s picture

I'd like to know more about this as well.

We rely very heavily on flexinode for our content. We just launched our drupal migration last week and the 'community' is picking up speed, so no reliable numbers to share yet.

Either way I can't tell how to get a total on individual flexinode entries? There is a row for each flexinode field per node. Did i say that right?

Carl Ditzler’s picture

A comment explained that "when you have a large number of fields -- the advantages of using flexinode degrade -- as you need to do a join for every field"

Could someone please further explain at what point degradation may begin? what is a large number of fields?

greggles’s picture

It's very hard to answer questions like that - someone has to dedicate a test box to the task controlled for other activity, create/run/validate a benchmark, add a field at a time redoing the benchmark, and chart the results looking for statistical signifcance.

The other point is that the performance problem (or lack of one) probably depends on the number of users in your system in addition to the number of fields in your flexi-node.

One option is just to not worry about flexinode and help move along the 4.7 development and use the CCK http://drupal.org/node/48429 which I believe should have better performance for a node with the same number of fields.

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Knaddison Family Blog