[cross-posted at drupal.org]
[thread started at civicspacelabs.com as well]

In various threads, like http://drupal.org/node/56972 and http://drupal.org/node/43712 there is very intense discussion about how to patch a problem with paths.module that causes sites with a lot of path aliases to eventually slow to a crawl as more and more paths are added.

I have one of those sites. It is a growing number of path aliases generated by path auto, and it is slowing down…. I need this fix. How do I fix it? I see various patches posted in these threads, but I also need to apply 4.6.6 for security reasons. I note that there will be no upgrade to the 4.6.x Drupal. One of the Drupal Gods (Killes? Dries?) dropped in on one of the threads briefly to point out that 4.6 is frozen. Well a lot of people are still choosing Drupal 4.6 to deploy right now, since 4.7 isn’t done and the modules haven’t nearly caught up with the core.

Apologies if this has become a non-issue since April 3rd when the last post on 56972 was made, but I don’t see a resolution, and the community as a whole should know about this problem before choosing Drupal 4.6.x if it isn’t going to be fixed. Path alias is an important component. The fact that it will eventually choke your site isn’t widely known.

Thanks

[UPDATES ON THIS BELOW THE FOLD]

killes@www.drop.org responded:

This will not be backported
killes@www.drop.org - April 13, 2006 - 08:45

This will not be backported to the 4.6 branch. Drupal 4.7 ill be released soon and we recommend that you upgrade as soon as this happens. We also invite you to try our release candidate to make sure your update is aas smooth as possible.
–
Drupal services
My Drupal services

Then a couple people objected, with killes coming back with:

It is quite debatable it it
killes@www.drop.org - April 13, 2006 - 14:15

It is quite debatable it it is a bug. But let me rephrase my statement: I will not backport it to 4.6. I won’t commit anything to the 4.6 branch sans security related issues.
–
Drupal services
My Drupal services

To which I reponded:

So, the door is open?
lectric - April 13, 2006 - 16:23
new

Killes, you must recognize that there will be hundreds, maybe thousands more deployments using 4.6.x before people use 4.7. Modules are not ready. Also, there are countless Drupal sites out there that may eventually be suffering from this problem. Think particularly of all the CivicSpace implementations with huge membershps and therefore potentially large paths collecxtions. Nobody with serious experience likes to be an “early adopter”. I have been building websites for twelve years and there’s no way I am about to start developing a site for a 55,000 membership org (my current contract) using 4.7. Maybe in a few months. Probably six months out. So you can tell people all you want to upgrade the 4.7 and use 4.7 for new sites. In the real world that won’t be the case for people like me.

So, when you say I will not… does this mean some other kind soul may take the initiative and see that this serious problem gets fixed in the core distribution? I would say Drupal’s reputation depends on it. As these sites grow, the problem will be come more prevalent and Drupal will be more and more known as that slow CMS.

As excited as you guys are about 4.7 and all the great improvements (there are too many to mention and I love it) it is absolutely required that you keep the legacy healthy by either fixing this paths.module bug or telling people why their sites progressively slowing down is not a bug but a feature of Drupal 4.6.

Kieran Lal of CivicSpace agrees this is a serious problem and had the following to say:

Hi, yes we saw it as a serious problem and did the initial work to
fix this problem here: http://drupal.org/node/43712#comment-64820

We are not going to branch from Drupal 4.6 because it largely effects
our development management. We did add a patches directory to the
CivicSpace release but did not finalize what optional patches to
include in the My Patches directory. As you can see the debate is
ongoing and we don’t want to get in the business of support a forked
Drupal release any more.

Please keep us updated on your progress.

Kieran

So the problem remains in CivicSpace distributions as well.

Killes then responds:

There are currently four
killes@www.drop.org - April 13, 2006 - 19:25

There are currently four active core committers, it is possible that one of the three others will commit this. I doubt it, though. The backported patch is freely available and nobody will inhibit you from applying it to your 4.6.6 install.
–
Drupal services
My Drupal services

To which I reply:

Certainly…
lectric - April 14, 2006 - 03:23
new

I will apply the patch to my 4.6.6 sites…once I see one for 4.6.6. The current thread on the subject http://drupal.org/node/56972 trails off and comes to no conclusion as to which patch people should be applying to 4.6.6. The “money” patch for 4.6.5 seem to be http://drupal.org/files/issues/path_alias_backport2.patch, but work on figuring out which patch will work for 4.6.6 has not finished and no new messages have been posted for ten days.

If no core committer will commit this patch, then there seems to me we are in need of an intermediary zone where critical patches like this can live next to clear instructions on how to apply them.

This one specifically could live at http://drupal.org/handbook/modules/path along with some copy that read:

If you intent to use the path module to create a large number of paths, then you should apply this patch to your Drupal 4.6.x site: http://drupal.org/files/issues/path_alias_backport2.patch

I still maintain (and this is supported by the reported performance gains post application) this is serious enough to be committed, and continuing to allow people to deploy with 4.6.x with this bug lurking off in their high n path alias futures is not a good idea at all.

Finally, what does the application of this patch do to the 4.6.x ->4.7 upgrade path? Will the 4.7 upgrade break and leave people who patch in the lurch?

Updated April 23rd: 4.7 replaces the files completely, so no problem applying the patch and then breaking the update.

Posted on Drupal.org ton ight:

Tonight I upated my CivicSpace sites to 0.8.3 (which is Drupal 4.6.6) and then renamed the three files that need to be patched (updates.inc, common.inc, bootstrap.inc) and replaced them with the files in the hiveminds distribution referenced above.

Everything is working fine and very snappy. Admittedly I did not test the sites extensively after updating to 0.8.3 and prior to replacing the patched files, but I assure you things are running far faster than they have in some time, and there appear to be no problems at all with using the hiveminds files against 4.6.6. Check for yourself at http://www.bcndpcaucus.ca/. This site used to have latency of ten seconds or more at times. There are about a thousand path aliases in the system right now.

So for those of you not comfortable with applying patches, test out the hiveminds distribution on your tst site and see if it works for you as well as it did for me.

Hivemids also includes a full 4.6.5 patched distribution, but it is rather worthless now that 4.6.6 is out.