Improve performance of views by change the base table.

On websites with a lot of users and especially a lot of nodes a lot of queries can kill your site performance.

One central problem is the usage of node access. It's recommended to avoid it as long you can, but there might be other ways to get around some problems. Here is one specific example which is quite interesting.

The goal of the view was to show the X latest users together with it's profile picture and some additional stuff. The site used content profile so a view with the base_table "node" was used. Sadly this query was horrible slow so views caching was set to a long time(using views caching is a easy and good improvement and is highly recommended).

When the cache had to be rebuild the query was still slow. So instead of using node as base table choosing user as base table made it. This improved the query time by the factor 10, because of several reasons:

• no node access system is used(which wasn't needed on this view)
• less rows has to be joined

In views3 recently a patch landed which allows to disable node access on a certain view: http://drupal.org/node/621142