I was just wondering if there were any changes in the Drupal 7 code that effect server load and speed for large sites.
Also, with 7 nearing beta release, should I wait to build the sites with Drupal 7? I'm a future kinda guy. I would like to be able to develop Drupal sites for a freelance business I am owner of, and would like to start soon. Is Drupal 7 accepted enough to be developing live, customer sites for? Security Issues?
Thanks
Although it has an enhanced object-oriented database API based on PHP Data Objects and other database-specific optimizations; CMS wire is reporting the new version is somewhat slower. Other testers have reported the new version has traded performance for flexibility.
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You should wait. There are few live Drupal 7 sites, but not many, and they're mostly done by Drupal experts, e.g. Drupal Gardens is running on Drupal 7, but that's made by the company of the guy who made Drupal itself. Drupal 7 is also a bit slower because optimization tends to fall pretty late in the development cycle.
That said, you can always try it out and go back to Drupal 6 if you run into roadblocks. For very simple sites, you may not have any problems.
At this moment, D7 is not even ready for development yet, so I wouldn't even think of putting a D7 site live. There is no upgrade path between alpha versions, so any bugfix could break your site. Once the first beta release is out, you can start developing.
To see what's new in Drupal 7, see the September 2nd sildeshow on http://webchick.net/node/70.
Keep in mind that there is more than Drupal core; you'll probably also need contributed modules. Figure out which modules you will need and make sure that they are available for D7, or help the module maintainer port the module.
To make the choice, I would ask myself two questions:
If both answers are yes, start developing once beta1 is out and publish your site when it's running on 7.0-stable. Otherwise, use Drupal 6.
You should wait to pass to Drupal 7 until Drupal 7 will have an official release that is not a beta release, or a candidate release, and when the modules you are using are converted to Drupal 7. Even in this case, I would suggest to wait, as there are probably some bugs in the modules converted to Drupal 7 that will be discovered when users start to use them.