[wp-hackers] many plugins and performance

[Andrew Nacin]

>
> But yes, there are performance penalties associated with the use of
> plugins. That's the price you pay for convenience. But plugins aren't
> nearly as inefficient as what you seem to understand them as being. :)


Very true, though performance penalties should not be associated with
plugins in general. Some plugins will have performance issues (whether by
design, or by poor design). But plugins are simply code, just like core, and
the core uses the same hooks that plugins do to provide a lot of
functionality. Check out default-filters.php for many of these.

There are 400 core references alone of add_action and add_filter, and that
doesn't accurately count a good portion of default-filters which often loops
through arrays of hooks and callbacks when WordPress loads.