Installing Drupal

It is a little bit questions about system requirements of the Drupal. I open site on a virtual hosting with PHP, MySQL, mod_php, mod_rewrite. Drupal was downloaded from cvs. After news announcements number of visitors on my site increase to 1000-1500 hosts per day - and I had troubles :( Site running very slow and many users (around 30%) got "Error 500". My hoster says: your scripts work too long and exceeds time limits. Today I install devel.module and see next situation: queries from database works very long time (I think). For example query of index.php at night time:

 (time in ms)
173.331  SELECT data, created FROM cache WHERE cid = 'locale:ru'
90.231   SELECT uid, name, data FROM users

On localhost copy of this database shows:

7.331    SELECT data, created FROM cache WHERE cid = 'locale:ru'
3.391    SELECT uid, name, data FROM users

Yesterday at evening times was around 3000-4000 ms :( Most of time eats SELECT FROM cache - sometimes great than 1000 ms. I set cache off, but SELECT FROM cache still executes :\ ??



What system requirements for site on Drupal with such number of visitors (around 1000 hosts/day)? Can me help Zend optimizer (installed on my hosting, but off by default)? Any another tips on performance increasing appliable to virtual hosting? Very thanx.



Sorry, my not so correct English :)


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Axel

Today i`m testing drupal and have one admin account which is mine. But when i decided to create a new account it uid was number 5.
What`s up with accounts uids from 2 to 4? (when i cheked them in "admin" i recieve a message "no such user")
I tried to solve this problem with renewing of "users" table in database - but get frustrated.
Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

How do I make the block (hardcoded in somewhere) visibly only to registered users?

Sorry for being stupid if it is obvious, but I am new to making modules, themes etc.! :-)

I was wondering what would be better, personally I thought that the forums look a bit bland for features, ie - post count etc and was wondering which other people would recomend?

My site uses Drupal, but I have never run a forum before so I amn't sure what to expect really. Maybe it would be better if I used the Drupal Forum until my site got started or something?

Any help greatly needed.

I have no any settings for access to devel.module. By default this is visible to all users or admin only?

Hi all,
Having a problem on www.dicelife.com with the alignment of blocks, they all sit on left even though I have set some to sit on right and also logo has gone and site looks plain compared to before I played with all the settings.

Many thanks for any help,

Lee