But what about for those who are less experienced in web programming and instead are picking up bits and pieces from all sources and just hacking away at pre-existing templates and then only to find out all the nice new things you’ve learnt and added to your themes etc have basically just turned for the worse being viewed in IE6 which doesn’t support halve the nice modifications you’ve made.

Thanks for testing that out – interesting to see what actual difference it makes. But, I’ll stand by what I said on PBD; the difference may be negligible or nothing, but hey, at least it’s good practice!

I’m not sure I agree with the testing method, but the conclusions and your comments about page caching are on the mark.

There’s a lot of misinformation out there about website scalability and speed, glad to see some people take it seriously.

Sean

As far as the PHP commands accessing the database each time, that’s not entirely correct. WordPress has its own cache built into the get_options function, meaning only one database request is made for each visitor, which is done by the wp_cache_get function. This don’t exclude the process time, but I think this single tip does little to nothing when compared to the other tips in terms of performance.

I understand what you’re driving at (”the original article isn’t correct, you shouldn’t be concerned with trivial details like that”) which I agree with, but I don’t understand what it is you tested, or what your environment was.

One thing stands out that makes me wonder what it is you measured — that you had a service time of 1/10000 second. This means whichever method that was, it can sustain 10K requests/second. 200 times that is then 2 million req/sec. If that’s complete page loads then that’s just insane performance.

Can you lend some insight into your testing methods?

Thanks,

Sean

You’re absolutely spot on with the caching angle, that makes it a non-argument.

However, if you’re not using caching, then I’d try to limit the amount of PHP commands used. For one visitor, there won’t be any discernible difference, but if you get a lot of traffic and you’re on shared hosting, then every little bit counts.

Don’t forget that most of the ‘PHP commands’ that Pro Blog Design are talking about actually make database calls. It’s one thing if you’re using PHP to echo text, but another thing if you’re accessing the DB each time.

My two cents anyway…

If people use it, then so be it, because it’s there choice

Or they work for a large corporation or government agency which still uses IE6 in their standard operating environment. Luckily, I run the web team, so I get to use Firefox, but the other 6000 people in my Department are stuck with IE6…

Of course, as a web developer, I can’t wait for IE6 to die!