Performance Chat Summary: 11 March 2025

The full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

WordPress Performance TracTrac An open source project by Edgewall Software that serves as a bug tracker and project management tool for WordPress. tickets

• @westonruter The second beta of 6.8 was just released.
• @westonruter There are 5 performance tickets in the milestone.
  • @johnbillion RE #63026, this is an issue with the performance of the tests due to the high number of user fixtures, all of which generate and hash a password for the user with each fixture. The regular performance tests are not indicatiny any general 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.. I think we can therefore remove the performance focus unless there’s an objection.

Performance Lab plugins

Discussing the upcoming release scheduled for Monday, Mar 17, 2025 at 17:00 UTC.

• @westonruter Let’s start with the upcoming set of Performance Lab releases which is due March 17th.
• @westonruter As noted by @flixos90, this release won’t actually include any update to the 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 itself. Instead there will be updates to Optimization Detective, Image Prioritizer, Embed Optimizer, Speculative Loading, and Modern Image Formats. Therefore, he suggests that we take this as an opportunity move away from using the PL’s version for the release tags. In reality this should have been done long ago when we split up the plugin into standalone plugins. So instead of the release branchbranch A directory in Subversion. WordPress uses branches to store the latest development code for each major release (3.9, 4.0, etc.). Branches are then updated with code for any minor releases of that branch. Sometimes, a major version of WordPress and its minor versions are collectively referred to as a "branch", such as "the 4.0 branch". being release/4.0.0 it could instead be release/20250317. The title of the release then I suppose would be 2025-03-17 as well.
• @mukesh27 Does the release triggered manually as we didn’t release PL plugin?
  • @westonruter The GHA workflow doesn’t depend on releasing the PL plugin anymore, right? I mean, ever since the plugin was split into standalone plugins, I don’t think this was the case
• @flixos90 It would feel a bit odd to have a release called 2025-03-17 in the 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/ releases page, but I’d argue that’s only because of the previous releases using the PL version number. It’s already odd now in that each release is labelled by the PL version number, but actually includes multiple releases using different versions. So I think that would be fine.
• @westonruter We can include a note in the release description that explains the naming convention change.
• @mukesh27 What happens in the future if we find ourselves in the same situation? Will we use the release date again?
• @westonruter Yeah, I think we’ll use dates from now on.
  • @flixos90 Are you saying we should use dates for the release branches and GH releases going forward even when PL is among the released plugins? If we are going to do that, we should modify the documentation in the CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Development Team builds WordPress. Performance Handbook.
  • @westonruter Yes, I think we should use dates going forward.
  • @swissspidy Agreed. Would be even more confusing otherwise.
• @westonruter There are 4 milestones for Monday which have issues/PRs:
  • speculation-rules 1.5.0
  • webp-uploads 2.5.1
  • embed-optimizer 1.0.0-beta2
  • optimization-detective 1.0.0-beta3
• @westonruter Looks like Modern Image Formats primarily just needs a couple tweaks prior to merging one PR. It looks like the other PR will need to get bumped.
• @flixos90 Regarding the changed branch naming and release naming strategy, anyone up for updating the Make Core Performance Handbook documentation accordingly?
  • @westonruter I can do it. I typically tweak the handbook after going through the release based on how it went.
• @mukesh27 I have to share update on the accurate sizes project: I picked it up and started working on it this week. The PR #1795 adds the ancestor 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. context and is ready for review.

Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, Mar 25, 2025 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.

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