Editing content-types in Drupal at development mode takes for ever

Question

While the site is in development mode, it takes for ever to edit content types and do various similar administrative tasks.

Is there a way to speed this up? What kind of hardware would I need?

Any specific MySQL optimization maybe?

Answer 1

Are you working on a local dev environment? That makes a huge difference. You shouldn't really need any big hardware as long as you're local. A new-ish $300 laptop with 4GB of RAM works fine for me.

However, no matter what you do, it's a lot of clicking, so the more you can learn to do that kind of stuff with code, the more efficient you can get.

Answer 2

This might help:

http://drupal.org/node/381668

Disable query log on all admin pages.

Answer 3

The devel module with performance logging is a great place to start to see where the problem is. You can see how many queries are being run per page and how long they take.
In my own experience of running Drupal on a netbook, the database was pretty insignificant in contributing to the page load times. The database was in fact considerably faster on my local machine than on the shared hosting environment I started out with (50-100ms vs. 1000-1500ms, as I recall). Due to the lack of processing power of the Atom CPU however, page loading times were about the same (~2-4 seconds).

If you're using something like XAMPP on a local machine, the default configuration is pretty lean. There are included configurations for larger servers, but beware of turning on the binary log.
Turning on the query cache can also be helpful, but to what degree is variable. It's the biggest boost for complex, often repeated queries; Drupal has some complex queries, but there is more so a lot of pretty simple ones. When you're developing you'll probably also invalidate the cache frequently. Regardless, on a local machine there isn't really any downside to enabling it other than some extra RAM usage. 32 MB could be quite reasonable to work with; I use more because I know I have plenty of available (even on a netbook).

Enabling a PHP opcode cache may also provide a boost in serving pages from your local machine. XAMPP includes the eAccelerator extension, though I would pick APC instead for a linux system.

The only other suggestions I have are trying to reduce the number of clicks you have to perform by using modules like Administration Menu, and make sure you're using a fast browser (e.g., firefox or chrome) since many of the administration pages use javascript.