Google's cache is up: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttp%...

Thanks for the quick cache link.

Heh, its a rant on Drupal. So the author is using Gmail as a "good thing" that would be made into a "bad thing" if it were implemented in Drupal.

Meta comment, I wonder when people using Gmail as an example of 'good' will figure out it doesn't have quite the approval rating they were thinking it had. Actual comment, its a known issue that programmers write things they like to use, not things other people like to use. It is one of the reasons programmers have an easier time figuring out modern technology that was built by other programmers, they already speak the underlying conceptual language. It is hard to see that gap unless you are a non-programmer.

Outside of the HipsterNews clique you'll find a great deal of people who like gmail very much, because it is a better interface than their old hotmail or Outlook Express inboxes.

Of the people I know who dislike Gmail very much, the comparison isn't to Outlook or Hotmail, it is to Gmail of 3 - 4 years ago.

The author forgot to install the increase_max_user_connections module, which is actually half unfinished and was implemented for version 5 of drupal, so he might have to tweak it to make it work in Drupal 7. Of course, such module is listed as a "featured" module in Drupal module site.

I was wondering the same thing.

But people here are funny: "oh, it is giving max_user_connections errors, let me keep refreshing the page to see if it shows up"

I expect most people would refresh after seeing the big word 'error' and not read any of the rest.

I think that's the real goal of the post: if gmail was built with Drupal it would be always broken :D

not Drupal fan but that error is not even Drupal related, seems like the database is running out of connections (HN spike)

It's more than likely Drupal related! Front end cache would have helped there.

Are you insinuating that Drupal lacks page caching? Because that would be a patently false statement.

No, but Drupal's out-of-the-box page cache caches pages in... the database.

Even with pages cached in Memcache, Drupal would open a DB connection by default (it's possible to override this using page_cache_without_database, but not everyone is going to do that).

Using something like Varnish as the primary page caching mechanism would work around this, albeit with some trade-offs.

Generally though, the fault with issues like this is often that the MySQL connection limit is set lower than it needs to be. Often, this is set at a level far below that which would actually cause the DB server to become overloaded, and it just starts rejecting further connections even if capacity exists to handle more.

EDIT: typos

Without cache, Drupal would never run as it drinks database connections in the hundreds per user request.

"Hundreds per user request" is just wrong. Generally, Drupal opens a single connection per request (and does not use any kind of connection pooling). Perhaps you mean that Drupal issues hundreds of queries per connection? (Which is definitely much closer to the truth).

Yes I was going overboard but indeed it is truly hundreds of queries and sometimes numerous connections per user.

Some sites I have had to deal with on initial inspection have 250+ queries per user (sometimes the same ones over and over due to plugins/modules) and people wonder why after 10 users it breaks the database/site.

Without cache on wordpress you might be in trouble, without cache on Drupal you don't run.

Still, Drupal is orders of magnitude more useable than other PHP frameworks like Joomla. The PHP that is fun is using microframeworks like limonade, flight etc if PHP is used.

I chose my words carefully. Not wanting to get too technical. I was not insinuating that Drupal hadn't it's own caching.

Page runs on Drupal > Drupal uses database > Database connections were exhausted. I was suggesting caching up front to bypass calls to the database (not specifying a particular piece of caching software).

At the time I was looking at the page through a 3rd party cache. I didn't realise the page had inline comments, those would of course complicate the problem.

It's not, but I came here to ask the same thing before it finally loaded!

It's not polite to mock (or get to the HN front page) a drupal site. We all know this boy is a little slow...

Exactly what I was wondering, especially as it's still not up after a couple of reloads.