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

Announcements

• Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
• WordPress 6.5 delayed (see blog post):
  • 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). 4 will be March 28
  • Release April 2
• Performance Team have launched two new plugins
  • Optimization Detective 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
  • Embed Optimizer plugin
• Reminder on timezone difference for this week, this chat will remain at 16:00 UTC and then shift to 15:00 UTC from April 2, 2024

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
  • Current release
  • Future release
• Performance Lab plugin (and other performance plugins)
• Active priority projects
  • INP research opportunities
  • Improve template loading

WordPress Performance Trac Tickets

• For WordPress 6.5:
  • @flixos90 Nothing concrete, though since part of the reason for the release delay is changes to the Font APIAPI An API or Application Programming Interface is a software intermediary that allows programs to interact with each other and share data in limited, clearly defined ways., we should probably keep an eye on that it doesn’t regress performance. As far as I understand the scope of the changes, it shouldn’t… but still worth staying on top of
• For Future Releases:
  • We already have 14 open items in the 6.6 milestone
  • @flixos90 update on #42441 (enhancing autoload API and disable autoload for large options) – The PR has two approvals and looks excellent to me, so I’ve marked the ticketticket Created for both bug reports and feature development on the bug tracker. for commit
    • Going to wait for a few more days to see if any additional feedback comes in, but generally plan to commit this next week so that we can get a lot of testing during the 6.6 release cycle

Performance Lab Plugin (and other Performance Plugins)

• @mukesh27 for standalone plugins:
  • PRs that have been merged:
    • PR #1048 – Support changing autoload value for largest autoloaded options
    • PR #1060 – Remove modules infrastructure
    • PR #1062 – Bump minimum required WP version to 6.4
  • PRs that ready for review:
    • PR #1091 – Improve UXUX User experience/UIUI User interface of enabling performance features via standalone plugins
• @adamsilverstein The Embed Optimizer feature/plugin is also newly available
• @flixos90 I have been working on two documentation drafts that replace the obsolete module focused documentation articles in the Handbook with their plugin focused equivalents:
  • This document has the draft to replace https://make.wordpress.org/performance/handbook/performance-lab/proposing-a-new-module/
  • This document has the draft to replace https://make.wordpress.org/performance/handbook/performance-lab/writing-a-module/
  • Most of the content is just the existing content adapted, to get an “MVPMinimum Viable Product "A minimum viable product (MVP) is a product with just enough features to satisfy early customers, and to provide feedback for future product development." - WikiPedia” documentation update sooner than later
  • Review and feedback of those two drafts would be super helpful so that we can update that documentation
  • I already opened https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1092 which replaces the obsolete “module proposal issue template”
• @thelovekesh Looking for brainstorming and feedback on:
  • https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1061
  • https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1085
  • And CodeQL PR needs one more approval. If someone can please take a look – https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/981

Active Priority Projects

Improve template loading

• @thekt12 working on PR split here – https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/6137, should add the new PR today for block_template_file and template_part, and keep pattern work in original PR

INP research opportunities

• @adamsilverstein As promised, I have collected the results of my INP research and am sharing now in this summary doc (along with a linked spreadsheet with all the data). If you want access to the colab and queries, please request it directly in the colab.
  • The summary doc Analysis section highlights some notable data for both coreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. and plugins/themes (with action items) that will be worth investigating further. Since there is a ton to absorb there, I think its best to leave comments/questions on the doc itself so we can discuss async, and maybe we can discuss further at a subsequent meeting.

Open Floor

• @pbearne one ticket from the old tickets https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/29717 might worth looking at
• @joemcgill We’ve traditionally done a post following a major releasemajor release A release, identified by the first two numbers (3.6), which is the focus of a full release cycle and feature development. WordPress uses decimaling count for major release versions, so 2.8, 2.9, 3.0, and 3.1 are sequential and comparable in scope. which gives an overview of the performance characteristics of that release. I was planning to draft one for 6.5 once we can take a final set of benchmarks, but I’m assuming that we’re going to end with similar metrics to what we’ve been seeing in the last several RCs, since we’ve not had any new improvements or regressions. I’ll also include details about the editor improvements, but that doesn’t effect any of the CWV metrics we’ve been focusing on. I’d appreciate any thoughts folks have about how to communicate the performance of 6.5 clearly, while accurately reflecting that our benchmarks do NOT show an improvement over the previous release.
• REMINDER: This meeting will switch to 15:00 UTC from April 2 (next week) onwards

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, April 2, 2024 at 15:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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