Performance Chat Summary: 28 March 2023

Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

Announcements

  • None today

Priority Projects

Server Response Time

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @joemcgill @spacedmonkey @aristath

  • @spacedmonkey worked on several tickets:
  • @aristath work continues in the SQLite project – as well as the php autoloader for wp-core
  • @joemcgill I’m just wrapping up an initial round of profiling observations, and plan to have something written up to share soon. Some highlights are that there are lots of places where we could try to reduce the use of file system reads associated with blockBlock Block is the abstract term used to describe units of markup that, composed together, form the content or layout of a webpage using the WordPress editor. The idea combines concepts of what in the past may have achieved with shortcodes, custom HTML, and embed discovery into a single consistent API and user experience. registration and template rendering that we wanna look into. There is also a potential opportunity for some improvements to the way translations are being handled and classic seems that we also want to review.
    • @spacedmonkey already has some fixes in the works for some issues we discovered while comparing notes. I continue to be somewhat hampered by only being able to use one arm, but I’m working through it.
    • @rmccue As an aside, I noticed that the method of merging translationtranslation The process (or result) of changing text, words, and display formatting to support another language. Also see localization, internationalization. files in memory is probably suboptimal and we might be able to avoid that. (I’ve been reimplementing pomo in native code, and noticed it there)

Database Optimization

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @aristath @spacedmonkey @olliejones @rjasdfiii

  • @olliejones Work continues on SQLite, next is to load woocommerce and beat on it.
    • Future project: identify as many places in core where the SQL is non-portable MySQLMySQL MySQL is a relational database management system. A database is a structured collection of data where content, configuration and other options are stored. https://www.mysql.com/. specific stuff and work on making it standard. Should that be a TRACTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker.?
    • @joemcgill I definitely think that having trac tickets that describe any improvements you’d like to see made would be useful.

JavaScriptJavaScript JavaScript or JS is an object-oriented computer programming language commonly used to create interactive effects within web browsers. WordPress makes extensive use of JS for a better user experience. While PHP is executed on the server, JS executes within a user’s browser. https://www.javascript.com/. & CSSCSS Cascading Style Sheets.

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @mukesh27 @10upsimon @adamsilverstein

  • @10upsimon We are addressing the issue(s) around script concatenation, work is in progress and in the final stages of review, with minor iterations ongoing. Unit tests are being implemented to validate the approach and should be ready for final review today or tomorrow.
    • We are entering into a more holistic/overall code review of work done to date, essentially a code review of all work done thus far as part of the epic. Minor iteration is anticipated as part of this review process and will be executed as required.
    • Work can be seen here
    • Various tests/testing scenarios will be undertaken prior to submitting a final pull request against.

Images

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @flixos90 @thekt12 @adamsilverstein @joemcgill

  • @flixos90 I have been continuing on the lazy-loading exploration and am getting close to opening Trac tickets for the individual pieces of work
    • To clarify, this is about avoiding to lazy-load LCP images, or rather in-viewport images in general
  • @flixos90 I have also been thinking a bit about the fetchpriority="high" feature for which we already have a module. One thing that we may need to iterate on there is that it just adds the attribute to whichever first image doesn’t have loading="lazy". This is not terrible, but it’s also probably not the best way to go about it, since the two attributes should not simply be mutually exclusive. The guidance is rather:
    • fetchpriority="high" should be only on the LCP image.
    • loading="lazy" should be omitted on images above the fold (i.e. potentially more images than just the LCP image).
  • @joemcgill I am in the very early stages of looking into ways we can improve the way WordPress calculates the sizes attribute.

Measurement

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @adamsilverstein @olliejones @joemcgill @mukesh27

  • No updates

Ecosystem Tools

Link to roadmap projects

Contributors: @joegrainger

  • @joegrainger We have 2 tasks remaining for the PluginPlugin A plugin is a piece of software containing a group of functions that can be added to a WordPress website. They can extend functionality or add new features to your WordPress websites. WordPress plugins are written in the PHP programming language and integrate seamlessly with WordPress. These can be free in the WordPress.org Plugin Directory https://wordpress.org/plugins/ or can be cost-based plugin from a third-party Checker infrastructure with plans to complete this week. Once done, we will start performing initial testing and review  the infrastructure holistically before working on the additional checks. Progress can be seen on the GitHub repo here. As always, feel free to take a look and leave any thoughts/ideas you may have in the repo. Thanks!

Creating Standalone Plugins

Link to GitHub overview issue

Contributors: @flixos90 @mukesh27 @10upsimon

New Projects / Proposals

  • @spacedmonkey Just flagging, I want to get the core unit tests running against redis. In my research, more hosts are using redis then memcache, so we could test against this and change our thinking of object caching in WP space from memcache to redis https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58000
    • @olliejones fwiw the SQlite Object Cache plugin has extensive perf. instrumentation built in.

Open Floor

  • @rmccue Re SQLite, I’m moderately concerned about the potential performance impact that introducing another layer of abstraction may introduce there. A traditional reason that WP hasn’t been DB-independent is because of (theoretical) performance gains by tightly coupling the two and taking advantage of that. (Which are assumptions I think do need to be tested.) I realise I’m coming in late to this, but I guess I’m just not seeing how the SQLite work ties into performance specifically. (I see a clear case for the non-performance benefits.)
    • @aristath Well, I admit that the tie between SQLite and performance is a bit weird… but the way I see it, it comes down to this: on a small, lower-end server, the server’s resources are shared between a php server, apacheApache Apache is the most widely used web server software. Developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. Apache is an Open Source software available for free., and a MySQL server. By using SQLite, the server can allocate its limited resources to php and therefore achieve better performance.
      It’s better for sustainability mostly, and for performance on smaller sites (that usually are hosted on cheap servers) the performance gains will be there
    • @rmccue I can see how eliminating the latency and translation between two separate servers for PHPPHP The web scripting language in which WordPress is primarily architected. WordPress requires PHP 7.4 or higher and MySQL could help performance, not sure of the overhead if it’s on the same server; that said, it feels like the primary goals of the project are not performance related
    • @olliejones It might ??? be a good idea sometime to spin off a team to do dbms-independence work, the target of which would be support for SQL Server, postgreSQL, SQLite, and, gag, Oracle. Having those would help scale up WordPress sites. postgreSQL especially because it can do wildcard searches with indexes. But that imaginary project’s connection to this team is a bit tenuous, as you mention.
    • Discussions here continued beyond the end of the meeting

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, April 4, 2023 at 15:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

#core-media, #core-performance, #performance, #performance-chat, #summary