WordPress Profiling

This repository contains the results of an experiment I conducted. The goal was to measure the resource consumption by major versions of WordPress. The measurements were performed using the StudyLIC profiler.

Measured versions:

• WordPress 1.0;
• WordPress 2.0;
• WordPress 3.0;
• WordPress 4.0;
• WordPress 5.0;
• WordPress 6.0;
• WordPress 7.0.

The pages of the experiment became:

• homepage.

Measured parameters:

• performance: time spent on generating a page;
• code simplicity: number of PHP preprocessor ticks used;
• simplicity of hierarchy: number of preloaded script files;
• code compactness: total size of preloaded script files in bytes;
• frugality: the amount of RAM used when processing a page request.

Where are the results?

They are located in the reports directory of this repository. Measurement results for each WordPress version are located in a subdirectory of the same name.

All subdirectories contain the following set of files:

• installation.html - a dump of the profiler installation results (as a static HTML file), it present a list of files in which observation points were placed;
• results.html - a dump of measurement results (as a static HTML file), it present a table listing the measured files with the data for each measurement;
• when-it-browsed.png - a screenshot after opening the homepage for the first time;
• when-it-profiled.png - a screenshot after opening the homepage in the profiler (in other words, a screenshot of the first screen of the results.html file).

Subdirectories in versions prior to 6.0 contain additional files:

• bugfix.txt - an inter-version code snippet that fixes the profiler's behavior in an outdated version of PHP.

Where are the details?

They are described in my article "WordPress version branches under the microscope" published on Habr.