Performance Chat Summary: 11 July 2023
Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.
Announcements
- Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
- WP 6.3 Beta 4 is today
- Working on a WordPress 6.3 performance highlights post – please add suggestions to the document by July 21
- Work continues on dev notes for 6.3
Priority Projects
Server Response Time
Contributors: @joemcgill @spacedmonkey @aristath
- @spacedmonkey committed
- @joemcgill Nothing new from me, but I plan to do a smaller version of the profiling report like I did for last release with 6.3 once it’s closer to fully cooked
- @spacedmonkey I have been keeping on eye on performance and seeing good results, even after lots of bug fixing and tweaks.
- @aristath These past few days I’ve been working on the PHP autoloader for WP. There have been a lot of changes in WP 6.3, so I updated the implementation accordingly to account for all these changes (PR#3470)
- @spacedmonkey I think we should discuss adding PHP autoloading to WP 6.4. I think that PR is getting close.
Database Optimization
Contributors: @aristath @spacedmonkey @olliejones
- @spacedmonkey Created a ticket – https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58757. <- Good first bug.
JavaScript & CSS
Contributors: @mukesh27 @10upsimon @adamsilverstein @westonruter
- @10upsimon Enhancing the WP Scripts API with a loading strategy:
- A draft Dev Note is in progress and I believe almost ready to be published, huge shout out to @flixos90 @joemcgill and @westonruter for their invaluable contributions thus far
- I’ve reached out to the documentation team around how to submit changes to Dev Hub pages, and have begun drafting potential documentation updates that will need to happen that are exclusive of the automated updates, with the goal of having those ready for review by latest mid week next week. Thanks @stevenlinx for pointing me in the right direction.
- Worth noting that auxiliary documentation efforts (docs not auto generated from code) have reduced somewhat following removal of deferred inline scripts
- @spacedmonkey Created this ticket, for remove hardcoded style tags https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58775
- @westonruter I’ve started exploring where script strategies can be used in core and Gutenberg. I don’t have a further update just yet but hope to have either a doc or set of tickets by next week.
- @joemcgill We should take a look at default themes too. Let me know how I can best support
- @westonruter Yes, I mean to include that in core
- @spacedmonkey I wonder if it could be used in the performance lab and plugin checker plugins as well.
- @westonruter Some of the changes may make sense as a module in PL first
- @10upsimon Although, I did do a performance comparison on a draft PR that @thekt12 had added based on this slack discussion and followed up in the thread, we agreed to pause on this for now and re visit it shortly with a broader script tree.
Images
Contributors: @flixos90 @thekt12 @adamsilverstein @joemcgill
- @flixos90 We got what I believe are the final lazy-loading & fetchpriority enhancements & fixes for this release committed. Lots of things landed last week and even earlier today
- @spacedmonkey Code reviewed the following (and they are committed by others)
- @spacedmonkey Created issue – block themes are adding either no lazy loading attributes / fetch priority https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58770
- @joemcgill I just committed the fix for https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58681 earlier today. This is a workaround for the way images created in shortcodes are handled. I think we’ll want to revisit the overall strategy for how image optimizations are being applied because right now the logic is a bit fragile. That’s mostly due to challenges that were introduced outside our efforts, and not a criticism of our work on those features.
Measurement
Contributors: @adamsilverstein @olliejones @joemcgill @mukesh27 @swissspidy
- @mukesh27 Fixed one minor issue for automated performance tests and committed last week https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58674 / https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/4804
- @swissspidy I spent some time looking into the whole performance testing CI setup, how to make it reusable, etc. Will probably schedule a call or so to further discuss this & then to some more exploring
Ecosystem Tools
Contributors: @joegrainger @mukesh27
- @mukesh27 We are working on the last issue for Milestone 2 for the Plugin Checker. Once complete we’ll be moving onto further QA/Testing and remediating over this week and next. Progress can be seen on the GitHub repo here. Feel free to take a look and leave any thoughts/ideas you may have in the repo. Thanks!
Creating Standalone Plugins
Contributors: @flixos90 @mukesh27 @10upsimon
- No updates this week
Open Floor
- @adamsilverstein I opened a new ticket to consider adding lazy loading to oEmbed iframes: https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/58773 – although iframes are lazy loaded by default now, oEmbeds are not included in that
- @spacedmonkey Could lazily loading iframes have issues around tracking? Some embeds, like say a video provide, like iframe to load, so they can have view counts.
- @westonruter Embed iframes wouldn’t be used for tracking, I wouldn’t think. If the video is never played then the view count shouldn’t increase, right? So same as if it wasn’t loaded.
- @adamsilverstein possibly, they would no longer load if they are off screen and never scrolled near the viewport
- @spacedmonkey What if a video is auto playing? You could build your website for your youtube channel to have a post blog for each video. In that case you would want it to autoload play
- @westonruter Note that autoplay with audio doesn’t work on mobile
- @spacedmonkey Autoload is only really a problem for ads. Autoload for a site where the user wants to see the video is differnet. On youtube, I would want to a video to autoload when I click on the video.
- @westonruter There may need to be a filter or documented way to turn off lazy load. However, if the video intends to autoplay then it should be in the first viewport, and thus it shouldn’t get loading=lazy anyway or it would load right away anyway. I don’t think we should worry about the case of an autoplay video being lazy-loaded that isn’t in the first viewport.
- @spacedmonkey The embed code from youtube doesnt have lazy load attribute. Why is that the case?
- @adamsilverstein there is an existing filter that can be used
wp_iframe_tag_add_loading_attr - @westonruter That’s a good question. I have been looking into that but haven’t found a reason yet.
- @spacedmonkey Vimeo also doesn’t have lazy loading attributes. I feel like the embed provider wants to have them lazy load, they would.
- @adamsilverstein we’ll need to test every embed type of course. i’d love if that were true, but providers aren’t doing that
- @westonruter These video providers predate the introduction of loading=lazy. Could be they just haven’t added it yet. Better for core to add anyway, because then we can omit from videos in the first viewport.
- @spacedmonkey I think this functionality should have a merge prospal and get feedback from the community. I know for a fact, I have using video providers that use iframe and needed the video to load to mark as an impression. Having a filter is all good. But that means that video provide X needs to create a plugin to use the video to opt out.
- @westonruter Why should an impression be given if the video is never in the viewport?
- @adamsilverstein we already announced and discussed oEmbeds would be lazy loaded in this post – https://make.wordpress.org/core/2021/02/19/lazy-loading-iframes-in-5-7/ we later reverted the change due to technical issues. lets start by discussing the tracking concerns on the trac ticket
- @spacedmonkey Can we explore this idea as a module in the performance lab? That way we can have people test this functionality.
- @adamsilverstein Absolutely, great idea! Here is the code needed to add the same functionality in a plugin – https://gist.github.com/adamsilverstein/e280062004c38629fc029b6d267bff91
- @spacedmonkey Being able to test things like this is the point of the performance lab plugin. We can get feedback from the community that was as well.
Our next chat will be held on Tuesday, July 18, 2023 at 15:00 UTC in the #core-performance channel in Slack.
