[wp-docs] Testing WordPress Performance

[Jacob Santos]

I'm looking for some input on the "Testing WordPress Performance" [1] 
page for the WordPress Optimizations category. I have a tendency to 
ramble on and add irrelevant information. I was wondering if anyone 
wanted to look over the page and give suggestions on possible 
corrections or make corrections to finished portions.

The specific purpose of the guide is to inform the developer how to best 
go about testing the performance and walk the developer through the 
steps to install two different PHP extensions in order to do so.

The Xdebug section is finished, the MySQLnd section is not. The MySQLnd 
section will be difficult, but it is built for PHP 5.3. PHP 5.3 hasn't 
been released, the MySQLnd driver/library is incomplete and can be 
considered unstable (alpha). It is also only (currently) for the mysqli 
extension, which not supported by WordPress. PDO support is being added, 
but that is even more unsupported by WordPress and unstable.

The reason to discuss mysqlnd driver/library, is that it has useful 
statistical data for MySQL. Sure you can use the MySQL utilities to get 
the same information, but the goal is to discuss this all within the 
context of WordPress and PHP. It would make better sense to discuss how 
to get the statistical data to better track SQL query performance and 
overhead. However, that is outside the scope of my knowledge. I do know 
PHP and so that is what I'm going to discuss in the article.

I think I will create a note for it for future inclusion, when I do more 
research on the subject. I do mention WinCacheGrind for Xdebug profiling.

Also, if you don't mind, I'll want to maintain the page for now. I'm 
probably going to modify it during the Summer and will no longer 
maintain the guide afterwards. That is if PHP 5.3 is released. There are 
some notes in the guide about PHP 5.3 in the future tense and will need 
to be changed to past/present tense after the PHP 5.3 release.


[1] http://codex.wordpress.org/Testing_WordPress_Performance