[wp-hackers] Freezing $now to increase query cache benefit

[John Joseph Bachir]

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, Mark Jaquith wrote:

> So, I wrote a plugin to do just that.  It updates an option with the 
> date/time of the most recent published post (updated on edit, save, 
> publish).
>
> It made a HELL of a difference.  The main post query, when grabbed from 
> the query cache, now takes less than 1/100 of a second, as compared to 
> 3-15 seconds before.

On Thu, 5 Jan 2006, David Chait wrote:

> There's a strong alternative: don't filter based on post date at all, 
> and move future-posts out of the 'normal flow'.  Future posts already 
> want to ping when they 'arrive', so the same cron/timing facility could 
> actually change a post state from, say, 'future' to 'publish' when the 
> post time passes.  That'd eliminate the extra query param entirely from 
> the 'average' query (I could see wanting to filter by date for other 
> reasons... but I think this'd all work nicely).  Thoughts?


This is certainly an interesting optimization strategy-- designing a 
system/schema around the idea of changing the generated sql queries as 
infrequently as possible in order to maximize cache hits. If the 
future-post system was changed in core to have the behavior of Mark's 
plugin, which would cut a big query out of every front page hit of a 
WordPress blog, think of all the sql processing that would be saved all 
around the world! :) Also, I wonder where else in wordpress we could do 
something similar?

John
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