[wp-hackers] backend script that will do only authentication, without loading complete WordPress

[Mike Schinkel]

On Jan 31, 2011, at 8:05 AM, Davit Barbakadze wrote:
> Mike, it is going to be an uploader. It will split files to chunks on
> client-side, upload them one by one and stick together on server-side.
> Server-side really should just check if user is authorized to upload
> files, and tell whether operation went ok. Depending on comparative
> sizes
> of the file and chunk, their number can be quite big. Obviously, the
> faster this process goes, the better. It's 3-5 times faster on clean
> install with free resources. I think on busy servers difference will
> rise dramatically. So I guess - yes - performance matters.
> 
> There was some important motivation behind load-scripts.php thing...
> it's not exactly that clean in my case, but I still feel like it's
> important.

Sounds like the actual uploading will be orders of magnitude more time consuming than the actual loading of WordPress each time. I wouldn't sweat it.

If you were building something that sent a character to the server via AJAX for every character that the user typed into TinyMCE  and expected a real-time response back, THEN I'd worry about it.

"Premature optimization is the root of all evil."  Or something like that. :)

Hope this helps.

-Mike