WP feeds performance? Miserable!

Today I get an interesting idea: to explore Wordpress’ **power demands while feeds content generation**. That means I probed how much time it takes to generate a XML file (either RSS or Atom, either with posts or with comments). I *hoped* that WP developers *presumed* – that feed pages are going to be the most hit pages, pages creating most of the traffic (sure, not measured in data volume in bytes but for example in DB queries). Obviously, they didn’t do so.

Now, of course I could make a nice table showing “exact” numbers, times and query-counts, but there’s no need. It’s enough to say: “To create a feed takes the same time as to create your WP index page.” Sometimes or somewhere it can be 0.15 sec., sometimes maybe 0.25 sec. This is not important because we know, it’s too much.

I am a man who thinks about power requirements of the software he makes, quite much. Before I write a piece of code, especially if the code works with database data, I think about the requirements. First I try to estimate total number of queries for a page and then I try (at least for a really little while) to find a better solution. What if some of these queries are in fact unnecessary? What if my script takes twice more time than it could… if I would present to the problem *one tiny moment of my brain activity*? This is the way I develop software, thinking forward. I presumed WP developers do the same thing, they should, but they do not.

Well, the problem is clear, I think. Who needs an illustration, example…? Ok, look. My blog visits about 150 people per day (-> it’s a little project). In the last month (May 2007), my blog’s home page was displayed about 2700 times. Let’s say 3000, to make it easier. But. The feed (RSS feed with posts) was shown over 30 000 times. Now you understand surely: **the feed should be generated faster than everything else**. It’s almost comic to think about your common pages’ performance while your feeds are the cause, the real source of most of the DB traffic (or CPU time…).

Try it yourself…
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Just open *wp-includes/feed-rss2.php* and at the last line add this code:

/—code php