Performance Chat Summary: 19 November 2024

Announcements

Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
Yesterday (Nov 18) saw the release of:
- Performance Lab 3.6.0
- Optimization Detective 0.8.0
- Modern Image Formats 2.3.0

WordPress performance Trac tickets
- Current release (6.7 released last week)
- Future releases
Performance Lab plugin (and other performance plugins)
- Next milestone
Active priority projects
- Project board

Table of Contents

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@joemcgill It’s not really clear what that release schedule will be yet, but we can already start planning our priorities

@mukesh27 Tomorrow we have bug scrub so we can take a look tickets in 6.8 milestone

@westonruter The most recent Optimization Detective release from yesterday has a key change that addresses an under-collection of URL Metrics from site visits. However, this change might result in collecting too much (or at least too many attempting to be submitted). So especially for high traffic sites, I’ve opened this issue along with @flixos90 to investigate further: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1655 Something to monitor this month
@westonruter For Image Prioritizer, I’ve had this issue on my radar for awhile which tackles a big missing piece for optimizing the LCP element’s background image when it is not defined inline (as is very commonly the case, like in Elementor, Divi, and even older core themes’ header images): https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1584
@westonruter Relatedly, something which isn’t being optimized at all right now is text, er, fonts. I wrote up a possible plan to implement a new “Text Prioritizer” plugin based on Optimization Detective which I’d love feedback on: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1313#issuecomment-2460537346
@adamsilverstein There are probably some other opportunities to optimize fonts as well, so maybe “Font Optimizer“. Thinking about web fallbacks to reduce CLS for example. eg. some of the optimizations from https://github.com/unjs/fontaine look like they could apply in WordPress

@mukesh27 and @joemcgill are working on defining the scope for https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1511. Soon, we’ll break this larger issue into smaller, more manageable tasks
- @joemcgill This has been blocked by my not having time to dig into it over the past few weeks, but I should have time this week

@westonruter yesterday’s release included the key improvement to use Ajax to activate performance features rather than full page reloads: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/1646

@westonruter Last week I learned that content-visibility is now available in all browsers (it is Baseline). This is something else I’m eager to explore implementing with Optimization Detective: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1308
@shyamgadde Yesterday, after new versions of some plugins were released, I tried to activate and install them from the Performance Lab settings page. However, the old versions were being installed instead. The issue seems to be that the plugin data, including the version number and download link, were stored in a transient, causing older versions to be downloaded. This behavior doesn’t seem correct. Perhaps when installing or activating a plugin, we should consider bypassing or refreshing the transient to ensure the latest version is used.
- @mukesh27 requested to open an issue in the performance repo
- @westonruter The transient shouldn’t be related to the version being installed