• The internal design of the browser, where it creates a sepeate thread for each webpage is great. I’ve run into situations with firefox where it crashes on me occassionally. It’s annoying to have a crash, especially when working on something. Chrome manages to seperate that crash so that the tab where the page is at crashes, not the entire browser.
• The user interface is simple. The url bar also acts as a search bar. It should have been like that from the beginning. It’s great. I don’t have to go between two different areas to go to either a webpage or do a search.
• The ability to create an application link. Say you go to a website often. Make it an application accessible from your desktop or quickbar. One click and you’re there. Awesome.
• I can drag a tabbed window from the browser and make it it’s own window without having the page reload. FRAKKING AWESOME. This is by far the best feature for me. As a developer, there are times I have multiple tabs in one window, but then I want to seperate the tab into it’s own window for side by side comparison. Now I can with ease. I can also drag a window back into the tabs, without the page reloading.
• It imported everything from my firefox browser. I was able to surf immediately.

Overall, I’m very happy with this browser. Granted, I don’t have some of the plugins I use for firefox, available for Chrome yet, but I think in time, they will appear.

So I noticed the more link and was wondering what it did. I created a test post, clicked the link, and it visual adds this line bar with a more link. I published the blog, went to the homepage and noticed, anything above the more link is shown, anything below it is not. Cool. Definitely a good feature to have. It allows your user to scan the entries when they view them on the homepage and when they view by category, then they can read the entire posting when they click more.

I’m happy.

Fedex, please update your dev site with this little bit of information.

In the process of my initial research, I came across one possible solution to the handling resources better. It’s called WordPress Light, that replaces the front end portion of the software, but limits your capabilities a bit.

Ultimately, I would like to have a blogging software that would run very efficiently on a VPS. WordPress is working fine for now, but I’m concerned as traffick builds up.

I’m a big fan of a small code that does things efficiently. Why would I be any different about wordpress? I decided to open up the first file wordpress calls to see what other files get included. As a result, I find a long list of files that are loaded just to display a page in wordpress. Below is the output of what I found. Every file that is indented is called from the file that proceeds it in loading. Here is what I found:

index.php
	./wp-blog-header.php
		wp-config.php
			wp-settings.php
				WPINC . /compat.php
				WPINC . /functions.php
				WPINC . /classes.php
				if (wp-content/object-cache.php)
					wp-content/object-cache.php
				else
					wp-content/cache.php
				WPINC . /plugin.php
				WPINC . /default-filters.php
				WPINC . /streams.php
				WPINC . /gettext.php
				WPINC . /l10n.php				

				require (WPINC . '/formatting.php');
				require (WPINC . '/capabilities.php');
				require (WPINC . '/query.php');
				require (WPINC . '/theme.php');
				require (WPINC . '/user.php');
				require (WPINC . '/general-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/link-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/author-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/post.php');
				require (WPINC . '/post-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/category.php');
				require (WPINC . '/category-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/comment.php');
				require (WPINC . '/comment-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/rewrite.php');
				require (WPINC . '/feed.php');
				require (WPINC . '/bookmark.php');
				require (WPINC . '/bookmark-template.php');
				require (WPINC . '/kses.php');
				require (WPINC . '/cron.php');
				require (WPINC . '/version.php');
				require (WPINC . '/deprecated.php');
				require (WPINC . '/script-loader.php');
				require (WPINC . '/taxonomy.php');
				require (WPINC . '/update.php');
				require (WPINC . '/canonical.php');
				require (WPINC . '/shortcodes.php');
				require (WPINC . '/media.php');

				require (WPINC . '/vars.php');

				load my-hacks.php is file exists.

				load plugins if active.

				require (WPINC . '/pluggable.php');

				load the locale_file for language.

				require_once(WPINC . '/locale.php');

		WPINC . /template-loader.php   (WPINC is defined in wp-settings.php)

Wow, that is a very long list of files to get called.

I decided to take this a further and look at the rendering time and the memory used for loading a page. I found the following for this website:

• Loading the homepage: Memory Used: 6,277,732 bytes; Time to Render Page: 0.5902 seconds.
• Loading a post: Memory Used: 6,229,616 bytes; Time to Render Page: 0.1445 seconds.

6 full megs to load a page! The rendering time I’m not too crazy about either. Now, there are ways to improve this by using caching for the pages, and a PHP accelerator to speed up the code, but the vanilla loading of wordpress taking up this much memory and time seems slow and excessive. Granted, this is running on a VPS, so the rendering time might be more in line with a VPS. This install of wordpress is a vanilla install, no additional plugins, and I’m using a version of the default theme with a slight modification to it.
The next thing I did was to try out the other site I manage on wordpress. The numbers for this other site was more interesting:

• Loading the homepage: Memory Used: 9,410,144 bytes; Time to Render Page: 0.0910 seconds.
• Loading a category: Memory Used: 9,448,096 bytes; Time to Render Page: 0.2936 seconds.
• Loading a post: Memory Used: 9,388,744 bytes; Time to Render Page: 0.1707 seconds.

Now the server that this other website sites on is a 1 Dual Core Xeon @ 2.4Ghz, 2GB of Ram, and good IDE drives. The memory usage is higher, but that site is using a number of plugins.

I’m definitely curious as to why wordpress is using so much memory in both cases. I’m working on a project right now that one of the items I’ve built for it is a backoffice admin running in PHP and a propritery framework. I’ve looked at the numbers for the page times and memory usage, and right now, It’s no where near wordpress’s times or memory consumption. The page load times for the admin are in fractions of a second (ie: 0.0051 to 0.0779), about 1/5 the time of wordpress on average. The memory usage for the admin is in range of 750K to 1,275K. Still alot less than wordpress.

This large use of memory by wordpress can have a negative impact when a website received simutaneous connections, there by limiting the concurrent connections a website can received. On this site, I don’t think I could survive a digg/oprah/slashdot effect, even on a small scale. There has to be a way to improve the basic install of wordpress to be more efficient.

One thing I did that did result in a drop of memory usage, is to remove a number of rss entries that are stored in the wp_options table. I just did this on the other site, and that removed about 600K from memory. The problem is, these rss entries will return. There’s something in wordpress that queries these rss fields and stores them in the wp_options and gets loaded into the wordpress object. I wish I knew why. This is something that should either be disabled completely, or at the very least, removed from the wordpress object, because they are not needed for use of a website.

Ok I proceed. Now I’m downloading 100-250K flash files for each page of the experience. All I want is a bit of info that takes up less than 10 bytes. I click on the sitemap page, which is another flash movie, where I find the link for the specifications. I click and am taken to an HTML page.

People, please for goodness sakes, stop the flash madness. YOU’RE KILLING TREES, *same idea as the Anti-SUV campaign*. Too many developers create nonsense flash. Flash splash pages, that i have to wait to load to get to the real content. thanks to those who have added ‘Skip Intro’ on their flash splash pages. by the way, how many times must someone see it to say ‘ok enough already’ when I visit your site more than once. Your work is not something fantastic, so stop.