@Jacoby who wrote “I’m curious how many queries other social network sites use on a single page load.”
I was too, and saw that it varies widely — from about 40 queries per page for the commercial SocialEngine script (which now includes Zend fragment and full page caching, very nice) to the mind-blowing 1.364 queries just to show the Dashboard on Elgg as reported in Elgg’s own forum. As for Drupal, it makes a similar number of queries per page as BuddyPress (of course it depends on the number of modules, etc) and with that level it is such a mess that Jesse Farmer, the main developer for Popsugar (the most trafficked social network built on Drupal) abandoned the project and wrote on a developers forum that Drupal is impossible to scale and “it would have been easier to start from scratch”. And bear in mind that Popsugar got $5 million from Sequoia Capital, so they have plenty of money to “throw hardware” at the problem.
@DJPaul, who said “Your post is not very constructive as you haven’t suggested a particular page on a site which interested developers could look into – saying that the entire thing needs attention may be valid, but we need to start from somewhere.”
I am not a coder, so how about starting here: I will pay $500 dollars to the person or team that reduces the number of queries on the main Buddypress blog page to around 20 (which is the normal number for a WordPress blog running the default theme). I am ready to escrow this money on the site of their preference.
Not only you Reboot, but the entire Buddypress team should be “worried about too many db queries”. Jacoby says that “WordPress has never been light”, I wonder what he thinks of Buddypress, since WPMU creates a page in about 28 queries and Buddypress needs 130 queries per page, about FOUR TIMES as many. It’s completely excessive and makes Buddypress unusable for anybody with any serious traffic and a low hosting budget. Performance (not features) should be the priority now, and the number of queries should be shown along with page generation time on testbp.org so that potential users see the kind of computing power they will need.
