Performance Chat Summary: 14 February 2023
Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.
Announcements
- Performance team roadmap for 2023 reminder, if you’re actively contributing to the WordPress Performance Team or plan to do so this year, please share your priorities for 2023 as a comment on this issue before end of day Wednesday February 15, 2023
- Team rep nomination reminder, please add your nominations for Performance Team Rep by Friday, February 24 2023
Focus area updates
Images
@adamsilverstein @mikeschroder
- @flixos90: we got the lazy-loading fix for block themes committed to WordPress core yesterday: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/55318 – just in time for the WP 6.2 Beta 2
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (10 issues)
- Needs Dev (1 issue)
Object Cache
- @spacedmonkey: Would like to get feedback on #57701 and Gutenberg PRs 48003, 48001, 48000, 47999, 47997
Feedback requested
- See above
- Needs Discussion (5 issues)
Measurement
N/A
- @joegrainger: Progress on the Plugin Checker infrastructure is moving along nicely. We’re aiming to have a working plugin running with some initial checks by end of the month. You can track progress on the GitHub repo and feel free to leave any thoughts/ideas you may have (the repo will be moved to the WordPress organisation when ready).
- @joemcgill: I’ve got a working implementation of a profiler setup, using XHProf in a wp-env environment that I plan on cleaning up and submitting as a PR to the
@wordpress/envpackage this week and will write up detailed instructions for how others can use these tools to profile WordPress locally. - @joemcgill: I’ve also been supporting @mukesh27 (who is also traveling today) on an initial implementation of adding automated server timing measurements to the wordpress-develop repo so we could begin measuring the performance impact of specific commits to core. Looking to try and open a PR later this week.
- @flixos90: I quickly hacked the WP core dev environment yesterday using @joemcgill‘s XHProf approach above to get it running there too: https://github.com/felixarntz/wordpress-develop/commit/ed096270d817eb9850ea54e4a30662cf2d9492d8
This is by no means a clean implementation, but something to potentially explore later; would be nice to get this optionally baked into the core dev environment as well so we can easily do profiling as we develop - @joemcgill: One thing to note there is that there is an observability cost to profiling, so it’s not meant to be a way of measuring performance from a user’s point of view, but instead to inspect the performance attributes of specific subsystems within a WordPress request lifecycle
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (5 issues)
- Needs Review (1 issue)
JS & CSS
- No updates
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (4 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Database
- @olliejones: SQLite integration: Lots of testing coming in. Ari Stathopoulos and Adam Zielinski have been hammering away on the SQL dialect translation issues. This PR will be an ongoing job.
- @olliejones: It would be nice to integrate some database query stuff into the Server-Timing API — that reports to the browser. I’ll do a module proposal.
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (3 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Infrastructure
- @flixos90: Reminder that next Monday Feb 20 is the PL 2.0.0 release (PRs still open in the milestone need to be completed by this Wednesday Feb 15, or they will be punted to a future release)
- @flixos90: As always, the 2.0.0 release will happen as part of our regular release party chat – please join @joegrainger and others next Monday, February 20, 2023 at 18:00 UTC here in #core-performance to get the release out! Any support and testing is much appreciated.
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (7 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Open Floor
- Approach for publishing modules as standalone plugins
- @joemcgill: That seems like a conversation about “which” modules should be published outside the Performance lab plugin, which is the same as this issue, correct?
- @flixos90: Yes 640 is related, but this is about our policy. Basically, if we decide every module is a standalone plugin, there will never need to be any discussions on which modules to publish and which not to
- @joemcgill: I think the only thing that is unclear is whether we’re going to intentionally not publish certain types of modules (e.g., site health checks) as separate individual plugins. I’m still of the opinion that those types of features, which don’t modify the user experience of WordPress, but are instead meant to help measure and/or provide performance feedback should remain part of the Performance Lab plugin itself, rather than being shipped separately.
- @flixos90: So I guess we have to decide between 3 alternatives
- @joemcgill: I think that’s a good initial set of options. As a thought experiment, we should apply these options to the current list of modules
- @flixos90: I took your request to heart and posted a list of modules here
Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, February 21, 2023 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.
