Top post update: "unacceptably slow means between 2 and 10 seconds to load the front page on a site with 12 beta testers, only one lgged in and no more than 20 articles posted, after applying the most popular "speed it up" fixes).
I am a newcomer to Drupal (although I have been a professional software developer for 30 years).
I am just setting up my first site, so am not committed yet and could switch.
Like many others on this forum and elsewhere, I find Drupal 7 to be unacceptably slow (which is a pity, because of the great features, but I guess that's what causes the slow load time).
I have done the research, google around, read blogs and forums and have tried all of the commonly suggested solutions, but to no avail.
I am currently polling my dozen or so beta testers on where the site is acceptable or just too darn slow, but that is just a formality.
So, can you please help? If I can't use Drupal 7 then what can I use?
The obvious answer might be Drupal 6 but sooner or later that will no longer be developed or supported.
Is there another CMS for my needs? I want to have a community site. That means, at a minimum, Forums, Polls, Groups, hopefully a wiki, individual blogs would be nice, maybe photo galleries, though that is less important, chat rooms would be good.
Just your general "bunch of folk with similar interests, although some of them have sub-interests & cliques" site.
I tried CMS matrix, but - surprisingly - didn't find anything. I am googling, but would prefer some feedback from someone with personal experience.
Again, I do not mean to slight Drupal 7, just to say that it's not for me … don't taze down-vote me, bro :-)
Please tell us what "unacceptably slow" means to you. For many of my applications, this is a few tens of ms. For others, it's a few seconds. You probably need to apply the standard set of website speed tuning tricks to make anything go quickly.
Use yslow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and related developer tools to help you troubleshoot why the site is loading slowly. Usually these types of problems are not the backend's fault, but are related to issues like over-large images, too many individual elements on a page, incorrect caching, etc.
Make sure your database is fast.
Don't use shared hosting.
Make sure you are not serving oversized images.
Verify that caching is turned on and works the way you expect.
Use a cookie-less subdomain for the static media files.
Compress and combine static files like CSS, javascript, etc.
If you're trying to host a busy, complex site on $5/mo shared hosting, I'm sorry, but that just isn't going to fly.