Does Running Lots Of Add-Ons Slow Your Site Down?

[Deepmartini]

How many add-ons are too many to be running at the same time. Does running many add-ons affect the site responsiveness? I was growing a bit concerned as I would need to use a lot of them to get my site to where I want it to be. Have you encountered any negative effects?

 

[Digital Doctor]

It's not the number of addons, it's which addons.
Probably the number of queries the addon adds would be a large factor.

What are the resource-intensive addons for Xenforo ? Not sure.

 

[Digital Doctor]

maybe the description of the addons could say how many extra queries they add ?

 

[mrGTB]

I'd have said the same, if an add-on adds more database queries it's going to effect things.

maybe the description of the addons could say how many extra queries they add

That's not a bad idea actually, included with add-ons to let people know.

 

[digitalpoint]

You can run quite a few add-ons before you start running into scalability issues (assuming all add-ons do zero queries). Most notably, the event listener system fires a call to check if it should run for every possible time *anything* is run. For example, if you have 50 add-ons that have any sort of template hooks in them and a page that has 40 template hooks that *could* run, you end up firing 2,000 static methods simply to check what should run (even if nothing actually does). I've made a few minor changes to the event listener system so that it's only firing events for things it actually needs and it made my pages noticeably faster (went from firing ~2,500 extra static methods per page view to around 5-10).

There is some info on it here: http://xenforo.com/community/thread...-type-into-single-php-file.22301/#post-281417

But even without the change, it certainly doesn't make the site so slow it's unusable. The bigger thing to watch out for is just poorly designed addons that make a lot of queries and don't utilize caching.