Comments on: WordPress, PerformancePress, and GSoC 2008

By: Muhammed

Muhammed — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 17:31:07 +0000

first how r u all ?
then i want to know something abt how to hack a website
i am not gonna to use this in illegal way but i want to know how to active this work i gotta be mad !!
if u read my reply i will be happy if helped me !!
mail me pls L nighty_soft@hotmail.com or nighty_soft@yahoo.com

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 13:39:55 +0000

Thanks for the well-wishes, Omar.

PerformancePress decides which code to load through an htaccess file (intrepreting what content is being called via the URI), which means Apache will be doing the checking (in C++, of course) and possibly caching the results (if it’s done in httpd.ini); so the overhead is neglible.

By: Omar

Omar — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:27:58 +0000

I do think the bit about selectively loading the code used in the site would be rather interesting to experiment with. I guess there will be a certain limit of modularity after which the code would be too busy deciding which bit of the code to load but tracking down that limit should be worth a try..

Good luck

By: alpha2

alpha2 — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 12:26:45 +0000

Yeah, it’d be awesome if you released PerformancePress!

By: Mahmoud Al-Qudsi

Mahmoud Al-Qudsi — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:49:00 +0000

Barry, Arnold: I’ll see if I can’t do some load-testing tomorrow (on Apache2 and possibly LightTPD comparing WP trunk, 2.x, and PerformancePress).

As for releasing the PerformancePress code… I’ll consider the options and see what happens. I was planning on publishing it prior to the start of GSoC 2008, and using the ideas and principles from there for the performance project; but you’ve given me some food-for-thought here.

My biggest concern is that I absolutely don’t want to publish anything that can be mis-construed as a fork of WordPress. So long as it’s sitting on our server and doing its thing, it’s just a WordPress install with an alternate frontend. But once it’s released, I can easily imagine it going the same way as LightningPress (which has gone the way of the dodo), which attempted to optimize the existing WP frontend (whereas PerformancePress is a complete from-scratch re-write using completely-different architectures).

Let’s get the load testing done, then go from there, shall we?

By: Arnold W.

Arnold W. — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 20:16:29 +0000

I realize that you guys are reluctant to release your highly configuration/server/environment-dependant code out to the public for many reasons (perhaps you’re worried it won’t perform as well on other configurations than yours?) but even if it’s not the answer for 99.9% of WP users out there; there is a very-capable userbase of avid code hackers that would take anything you care to dish out and make the best of it.

So what if it’ll take a day or two to strip out all the references to your own configuration? It’s better than us having to rewrite WP, especially if someone’s already done it and did a good job (i’m judging by the PerformancePress page-load times on this site).

I second what Barry says about the benchmarks - I’d love to see some stress-test results for the two systems on a “normal” dedicated server running Linux, Apache2, and PHP5.

Seriously, please consider releasing the code. After all, odds are thanks to community contributions and patches you’ll end up further increasing the performance of PerformancePress on your own server, etc. Even if you don’t feel like doing the work to clean it up and “generic-ize” it, just release it and someone or the other in the huge WP community would do the rest!

Drop me an email if there’s anything I can do to help or further convince you!

-Arnold

By: Barry Abrahamson

Barry Abrahamson — Sat, 22 Mar 2008 17:03:26 +0000

I would be interested in seeing some performance comparisons between WordPress trunk and PerformancePress under high levels of concurrency. Also, even if the PerformancePress code is not directly applicable to mainstream WordPress users, the principles likely are. It would be nice to see the code released or at least made available.