ExpressionEngine : git : local development : remote database

It seems there is a lot of time lost on failing DNS requests, with a remote database.

Start your MySQL server with start mysqld with --skip-name-resolve. (More information on this topic can be found here: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/host-cache.html)

Having a remote database still seems to be the best way for us to work on a project with multiple developers.

I almost always use a central database for development. Depending which host you use, the speed difference may not be huge.

Obviously, if you're not making changes to the database, i.e. only doing template development, keeping the database in sync is not as needed, so you could potentially bring up a local copy of the database. You just have to remember to repeat any database changes, if you do end up making some.

As far as version control, I keep a copy of my base EE install's SQL file in my base repository. Other than that I don't usually keep copies of the database in Git, so I don't do a lot of importing/exporting, etc.

Have you looked at the EE Profiler recently? You'll probably notice in the neighborhood of 20-80 queries on your home page depending on it's complexity.

The problem is that, for each query, MySQL must execute a remote request for data, download the response, and then present ExpressionEngine it's data. The 20-80 round trips to the database is what's causing your delay and I don't think there is much you can do about it. When using a remote (outside our network) database, I get the same delay as you.

When MySQL is running on your machine or the production server, it doesn't have the added network requests causing latency in it's requests for data. This is the difference.

As for fixes, all you can do is move to a database hosted on your internal network. We have a Linux machine that mimics our production environment that we use for staging. Since it's on our network, we can use the local IP address in our database.php file. This is much faster.

The problem that we still have is the issue of channels/fields/entries. When a developer is working on a new section, they'll likely need to create a new channel and fields and/or new entries. When we're ready to push that functionality to production, we have to manually make those changes on the production server as there is no way to reliably export them. I am hopeful of this addon though---we'll see.