Performance Chat Summary: 28 February 2023
Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.
Announcements
- Team rep nomination decision – consensus from the group is to skip the voting stage and allocate @clarkeemily as Team Rep, as there were no other nominees
- WordPress 6.2 performance improvements:
- @flixos90 it’s just great news: WordPress 6.2 is notably faster than 6.1
- Both on the server-side and the client-side: See Web Vitals and the more granular server-side Server-Timing metrics
- All these are based on lab metrics for core, but after several weeks of different testing methodologies being tried, I believe we now have an approach that works well for this type of benchmarking (I plan to document it soon)
- One note here is to please be mindful that those are metrics for just WordPress core. Since actual WordPress sites will be heavily influenced by the theme and plugins, the real improvements across the WordPress ecosystem will not be that high
- With that said, it’s a major accomplishment for the WordPress core release itself, and WordPress core getting that much faster certainly helps all sites out there to get at least a little bit faster
Focus area updates
Images
@adamsilverstein @mikeschroder
- @adamsilverstein no new updates as has been out for a few weeks at WC Asia
- @clarkeemily Image fetchpriority attribute is now standardized, some folks are working on proposal for automatically adding the attribute to LCP image in WordPress core based on Performance Lab module
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (10 issues)
- Needs Dev (1 issue)
Object Cache
- No updates this week
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (5 issues)
Measurement
N/A
- @joegrainger we are working towards completing the infrastructure for the Plugin Checker. Once done we will be at a point where we’ll have a working plugin running with initial checks. You can see progress on the GitHub repo here. Feel free to leave any thoughts/ideas you may have in that repo too.
- @mukesh27 Automated performance testing core PR is ready for review
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (5 issues)
- Needs Review (1 issue)
JS & CSS
- @10upsimon update on WRT Script Loading Strategy:
- Engineering work for Milestone 1 has been completed and issues closed out.
- Engineering for Milestone 2 is almost complete and in a state of iteration and ongoing revision. It is almost ready for approval after which functional testing of Milestone 2 will commence
- On completion of Milestone 2, we will have a functional means of executing loading strategies on registered scripts, and work on Milestone 3 (relating to inline scripts) will commence.
- The epic is tracking well, with no concerns from my part (here’s the repo for folks to view)
- @joemcgill That’s all pre-work on an approach for #12009 that we’re hoping to have ready for 6.3. I think Simon plans on posting an update to that ticket that briefly outlines the approach later this week.
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (4 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Database
- @olliejones SQLite: Lots of compatibility issues https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3Aopen+label%3A%22%5BModule%5D+SQLite%22 are coming up. This isn’t surprising considering two decades’ history in core using one particular SQL dialect, then trying to add another.
- We’ll need at least one epic to turn this from experimental stuff into deployed stuff.
- Is it possible wordpress.com people have a closed-source compatibility layer for something like Oracle or postgres that we can learn from?
- @aristath Currently OTP, but just a quick update on SQLite: @zieladam and I completely rewrote the implementation using a lexer and a parser. Almost all WordPress phpunit tests are passing now, and all the issues that have already been reported, have already been resolved. The implementation has already been released in the standalone plugin, and I’ll be back porting the changes to the PL plugin as soon as we push a couple more minor tweaks
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (3 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Infrastructure
- @flixos90 All the issues that are part of milestone 1 for creating standalone plugins are now defined with their individual requirements. See https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/656 for the overview
- You can from there go into the Milestone 1 issues to review, any additional feedback would be much appreciated
- I think we can start engineering on the first issue this week
- @mukesh27 has picked up https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/635
- @flixos90 Also noting that the idea is to eventually maintain SQLite in the monorepo as well, see https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/661; right now developing the code in two places is a maintenance burden as seen above (cc @aristath)
- Though we will only be able to unify the two codebases once the
WordPress/performancerepository is set up to deploy standalone plugins, so it’ll be a few more weeks
Feedback requested
- Needs Discussion (6 issues)
- Needs Review (2 issues)
Open Floor
- @clarkeemily Circling back to Team Rep nominations, there were quite a few thumbs up to the comment so I presume we can agree on myself being the new Team Rep – general consensus is yes!
Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, March 7, 2023 at 16:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.
