I noticed this blog was slow from time to time, and decided to do a bit of investigation.
That took the form of a very very sweet hack that I will publish at a later date, but for now I’ll just share some of the results.
In the sidebar I am using pretty standard WordPress plugins to load in
- my latest images from Flickr
- my latest tweets from Twitter
- my recent bookmarks from del.icio.us
These plugins are all implemented as server-side fetches.
Here’s the thing, those services aren’t always very fast. For example, on a recent run I got these results:
| Host | Service | Load Time |
|---|---|---|
| 128.121.146.228 | 1.831s | |
| fe.feeds.del.vip.ac4.yahoo.net | del.icio.us | 1.148s |
| www.flickr.vip.mud.yahoo.com | Flickr | 0.274s |
I guess I need to either switch to using an in-browser widget model, or cron a fetch of that data locally on some reasonable interval. That might be a nice service for WordPress to have internally for widget authors: ‘cron/cache mode.’ Provide a URL to curl periodically that updates the caches on all your active widgets, as well as a global configuration about how fresh you want your data to be.
I don’t care if any of those results are more than an hour up to date, I’d much prefer to have my page load time cut by 3.24 seconds than have it be up-to-the second accurate.