Performance Chat Summary: 12 March 2024

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

Announcements

  • Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
  • Reminder on timezone difference for the next 3 weeks, this chat will remain at 16:00 UTC, then it will switch to 15:00 UTC from April 2

Priority Items

Structure:

  • WordPress performance TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets discussion
  • Performance Lab 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 (and other performance plugins) discussion
  • Active priority projects
    • Plugin checker
    • Improve template loading
    • INP opportunities research

WordPress Performance Trac Tickets

  • For WordPress 6.5:
    • @joemcgill opened #60749
      • @flixos90 asked if this is mostly a memory win?
      • @joemcgill It does seem to be less of an impact on IWT than what I was measuring on Friday. Still not sure what the difference is there, or if there is some caching in play that I had disabled on Friday. Even so, it does make a positive impact and memory consumption can lead to slower IWT. The other place that could use more eyes is trying to identify opportunities to improve the performance of the Navigation 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., which went through a bigger refactor during this release, which is leading to longer rendering times. I don’t think we’ve identified any particular flaw thus far
    • @flixos90 working on the ongoing research on potential performance regressionregression A software bug that breaks or degrades something that previously worked. Regressions are often treated as critical bugs or blockers. Recent regressions may be given higher priorities. A "3.6 regression" would be a bug in 3.6 that worked as intended in 3.5. that I think is still unresolved [link]
    • @joemcgill will plan on doing another set of benchmarks for RCrelease candidate One of the final stages in the version release cycle, this version signals the potential to be a final release to the public. Also see alpha (beta). 2 once it has been released, and can continue
  • For Future Releases:
    • We already have 16 items in the 6.6 milestone, but it’s a good time for folks to start thinking about what they are wanting to focus on for the next release.

Performance Lab Plugin (and other Performance Plugins)

Active Priority Projects

Plugin Checker

  • Mostly quiet since the 1.0 release. There is the start of a 1.1 milestone, but I think the folks involved in next steps here have been mostly busy with WC Asia and 6.5 release work.

Improve template loading

INP research opportunities

  • @joemcgill Last item in our active priority projects list: INP opportunities research. I believe @adamsilverstein recently did some research on this, but am unsure if there is anything ready to be shared yet. We can pick this up in a future meeting. That is a good reminder to everyone that INP became a CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Web Vital starting today: https://web.dev/blog/inp-cwv-march-12
    • One of our team goals for this year is to find ways to improve WP this metric, so it’s good to keep in mind.

Open Floor

  • @thelovekesh asked Currently when we do a plugin release it triggers two workflows:
    • PL plugin release
    • and Standalone plugin release.
    • Do we always need to trigger the workflow for standalone plugins?
  • @flixos90 By default, new versions of standalone plugins are triggered together with the PL plugin release. Other than that, it would need to be the manual workflow. That’s how it works now. There’s certainly things that can be improved. We need to rethink our release strategy, for instance also whether we want to have releases of the standalone plugins tagged on GitHubGitHub GitHub is a website that offers online implementation of git repositories that can easily be shared, copied and modified by other developers. Public repositories are free to host, private repositories require a paid subscription. GitHub introduced the concept of the ‘pull request’ where code changes done in branches by contributors can be reviewed and discussed before being merged be the repository owner. https://github.com/ in addition, which right now is missing
  • @thelovekesh We might need to streamline release notes for PL and standalone plugins. Currently we are including them for PL plugin. With https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1033, we are attaching all release assets on specific release.
  • @flixos90 Right, the changelog generator also only works for PL right now.
  • @pbearne is working down this list in age order to review/renew [link]
    • @flixos90 I gave your PR for limiting autoloaded options size another review last week, it looks really good, just a few minor things. Have you been able to take a look at that? I’d love to commit this early in the 6.6 cycle
    • @joemcgill Something else that would be helpful is that if you run across an issue that you think should be prioritized because it makes a big impact to improve overall performance for end users, please share it in the channel so we can get more eyes on it and get it into a milestone.
    • @pbearne will start with these tickets 18836 ORDER BY RAND() is slow
      If we can get some modified SQL that works
  • REMINDER: This meeting will continue at 16:00 UTC for the next 3 weeks, then it will switch to 15:00 UTC from April 2 onwards

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, March 19, 2024 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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