Performance Chat Summary: 1 August 2023

Table of Contents

Announcements

Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
RC3 is scheduled for release later today
Video from the Hallway Hangout that occurred last week is available for those who were not able to attend.
Please read and leave feedback on this follow-up post by @tellthemachines about how to improve the release workflow between the Gutenberg and Core repos during the release process

@joemcgill and @mukesh27 are working on an exploration of how to improve template loading of classic and block themes. Ideas are welcome.
@swissspidy is still looking for feedback on this post about i18n performance improvements

@weston has been working on adding async/defer to more places in core
- Merged this PR that used defer for all block view scripts
- Committed the use of async for the comment-reply script in core
- Proposed adding defer to the wp-embed script, even though his analysis didn’t show much performance benefit.
@weston reported that now that HTTP Archive has custom metrics for WordPress scripts, he’s been starting to dive into doing queries for how well sites are using the scripts API, including to what degree they’re using $in_footer and how many are currently using async and defer even before our official way of doing so
He’s also been doing some research into which specific plugins are responsible for those blocking_in_head scripts. So we’ll have some opportunities for ecosystem outreach hopefully soon
Review/feedback on his HTTP Archive queries would be appreciated
- Later in the meeting, Weston followed up to share that Felix had identified a flaw in the query he was using go get counts of scripts using async and defer from the HTTP Archive. He plans to revise and share updated results

@flixos90 plans to do another round of benchmarks for RC3 after the release today

@mukesh27 has been working on some follow-up issues for the Plugin Checker and requested feedback
- PR #237 – Ignore .git, node_modules, and vendor directories from the checks
- PR #238 – Fix errors detected by Plugin Checker
- PR #239 – Incorrect display of readme.txt instead of readme.md in Plugin Readme check