This lightning talk examines the entity load times for different objects including nodes, users, field collections and users. Comparisons are made between different caching strategies, including entitycache, as well as the weight added by fields and hooks. Just how heavy are nodes anyway?
It is often said that the future of Drupal data modelling is entities. Nodes are often perceived as being heavy, slow and not suitable for building sites out. This presentation examines these claims by looking at the performance of a range of different entities in a variety of caching situations. It was found that the entitycache module lead to large improvements for the common entities, so much so that the differences between heavy and light entities was quite small. It is argued that the tradeoff between developer time and render time is one worth considering, especially when the differences in load time is so small.
The presentation made to the Sydney Drupal Meetup (21st March 2013) has been attached below.
