Performance Chat Summary: 12 December 2023

Meeting agenda here and the full chat log is available beginning here on Slack.

Announcements

Welcome to our new members of #core-performance
End of Year Performance Hallway Hangout video recording has been posted
Reminder there will be no Slack meeting Tuesday December 26

Priority Projects

Server Response Time

Link to roadmap projects and link to the GitHub project board

Contributors: @joemcgill @swissspidy @thekt12 @mukesh27 @pereirinha

@thekt12 update on various items:
- Improve performance of `_get_block_templates_paths` (Ticket #58196) Added Unit test – https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/5281 Need to fix the Review changes.
- Improving block variations calling for perfromace ( We will need GB team to give us their feedback here) WordPress-develop PR – https://github.com/WordPress/wordpress-develop/pull/5718/files
- Guttenberg-PR – https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/pull/56952/files. ( need to incorporate feedback)
- Need to check how https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59969#comment:13, would impact our code.
- Started with analysis on –https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/59719#comment:7
@joemcgill Essentially, block variations for several dynamic blocks are built dynamically on every request, but from what we can tell, they’re only needed in the editor, so we should be able to support registering a callable that will dynamically build the variations when requested. I’d like to get feedback from someone on the Gutenberg side more familiar with how these are consumed (e.g., @mamaduka, etc).

Database Optimization

Link to roadmap projects and link to the GitHub project board

Contributors: @mukesh27 @thekt12

No updates this week

JavaScript & CSS

Link to roadmap project and link to the GitHub project board

Contributors: @mukesh27 @flixos90 @westonruter

@flixos90 I drafted a module proposal for the Speculation Rules API integration last week: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/897
- The formerly experimental draft PR has been polished to become the foundation for that new module: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/pull/733
  It’s targeting a feature branch as it’s not yet the entire MVP module functionality yet, as outlined in the module proposal issue

Images

Link to roadmap projects and link to the GitHub project board

Contributors: @flixos90 @adamsilverstein @joemcgill @pereirinha @westonruter

@westonruter For Image Loading Optimization, the pull request for improved breadcrumb handling of images to optimize is still ready for review.
- I have a sub-PR off of that in which I’m nearing full PHPUnit test coverage. Hopefully I’ll complete this today and it will also be ready for review.
- After these are reviewed and merged, I’m eager to enhance with background-image optimization. I’ll probably start with a sub-PR while waiting for the above to be merged.
@flixos90 I wonder whether we should focus on getting the module ready for launch first before moving on to another feature like BG image support. I feel like optimizing tags is the primary focus here, so probably sufficient for an MVP
@westonruter It won’t be much additional code though and the groundwork is in place, so that’s why I want to target it.
@flixos90 Sounds good, we can assess further in the PR, that’s helpful to have regardless
@flixos90 From my side, I ran a couple queries last week to kick off further field research on fetchpriority accuracy problems: https://colab.sandbox.google.com/drive/1KCowq4J2oPnxmjXjQVTpO5d6sC9qi8s1 At this point I’ve only gathered some data, and I still have to think further what to make of it or what else to query. But it’s a good starting point I think
- The approach for these queries was to only consider URLs that have the same LCP image element for both desktop and mobile, as that’s the only problem vector we can address with the core functionality. If the LCP element differs, it’s more difficult and can’t be addressed with the fetchpriority="high" attribute. That part is covered by the image loading optimization module @westonruter has been working on
@swissspidy Regarding images, I have been working on this client-side image compression project a little bit: https://x.com/swissspidy/status/1733138082591912154?s=46&t=f5Z4bXmUuYQYdSgET7F2UQ
@swissspidy Speaking of fetchpriority, that just landed in Safari 17.2 yesterday