Performance Chat Summary: 23 April 2024

Announcements

Structure:

WordPress performance Trac tickets
- Current release (WP 6.6)
Performance Lab plugin (and other performance plugins)
Active priority projects
- Improve template loading
- INP research opportunities
- Improving the calculation of image size attributes
- Optimized autoloaded options

Table of Contents

@westonruter the Speculative Loading plugin is already at 9000+ active installs! I expect it to tip into the 10k+ range today as the counts have been increasing about 1k per day
- @joemcgill One of the important things for us to understand with Speculative Loading is what the impacts are on the sites that are using it, that includes performance impact, obviously, but also how it effects things like server resource usage, integration with analytics or other things that may not expect some requests to come from non-users.
- @westonruter Yes, the readme has been updated to note that. However, people don’t always read the readmes
@westonruter planning to kick off the Image Prioritizer plugin this week which will split out the image-specific logic from Optimization Detective, leaving that plugin as an API dependency. We can then feature Image Prioritizer in the PL plugin to promote to users.

@joemcgill For the ongoing template loading epic we’ve been working on (https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/746) there are 3 main tickets we’re tracking for 6.6:
@joemcgill On #59600, I just committed r58025, which covers block theme patterns on Friday. As @thekt12 has looked into improvements for block templates and template parts, it seems that most of the cost is related to the underlying Theme JSON processing, which is covered by #57789
- @joemcgill did some cleanup, and added some updates to #57789 on that ticket yesterday
@spacedmonkey Is anyone looking into #59596
- Call file size on every css file results in multiple file operations. Might be a good one to pickup, there is already a PR, should be simple to get across the line.
@thekt12 most of this is repeat to what @joemcgill said above-
- #59600 Performance regression in block tempalte part was related to get_theme_data ( this will be handled in #57789 )
- #59595 Current implementation (PR#6392) was found to have benefit but need to resolve circular dependency – a bit complex scenerio (this)
- #57789 So far we have observed benefits of caching WP_Theme_JSON_Resolver::get_theme_data – I am checking any side effects if we do so.
- We will be caching WP_Theme_JSON_Resolver::get_core_data data inside WP_Theme_JSON_Resolver::get_merged_data , we believe it will result in 3-4% improvement alone and is not subjected to much change.

@joemcgill noted that he worked with @adamsilverstein and started looking into creating a Colab to capture and compare metrics for this, which is what I’m planning to focus on this week

@joemcgill I created a follow-up ticket last week to update the default auto load option values that get set by core to use the new schema we introduced in #42441. @pbearne also started a draft of the dev-note for that change, which I owe a review on.
- #61045 is the new ticket
- @pbearne do we need to look at default themes?
- @joemcgill I think that’s probably a good idea. Interestingly, it looks like the commit for #42441 may already have a positive performance impact in our performance tests, which is a bit unexpected given that we shouldn’t have changed the autoload behavior for any core options, so it’s something I want to review deeper.
- @joemcgill You can see it in https://www.codevitals.run/project/wordpress and also in the Performance Test GH Summary for that commit

@clarkeemily An announcement here that we have WordCamp Europe coming up June 13-15 in Turin, Italy
- There will be a Performance Table on Contributor Day (Thu Jun 13) lead by @adamsilverstein – we would love to see as many people there as possible!
@thelovekesh We have an issue open for feedback on moving PL plugin in plugins directory – https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1165
- @joemcgill I’d love to see additional feedback from all of our frequent contributors to this proposal
@joemcgill We also have an open issue going about the need to update some of our plugin assets after some recent name changes: https://github.com/WordPress/performance/issues/1136
- @clarkeemily to reach out to Sigal who helped with the existing assets, to provide some mock ups
@joemcgill is planning to post a 6.5 wrap up post about our performance efforts this week, just waiting on some final review feedback to come in.