Comments for planetOzh

Comment on Speeding Things with PHP Output Buffer by Ozh

Ozh — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:11:52 +0000

Will Anderson » hey Will thanks for commenting on this 4 yo post :) Yeah, my interpretation was something similar, but for some reason (at that time at least) I was a bit scared by OB, it seemed to me that would be a slow beast.

Comment on Speeding Things with PHP Output Buffer by Will Anderson

Will Anderson — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 00:25:01 +0000

OK, so this is a ~4 year old post, so I feel sort of silly commenting on it, but since you linked to it on Twitter I thought I’d throw my own two cents into the interpretation of the outcome.

In your first example, the reason buffering performs better is not because output buffering in itself is more efficient. in fact, the opposite is generally true, especially when memory consumption is considered.

The reason the first example ran faster with output buffering is because of the way string concatenation works in PHP (and most other languages). Strings aren’t mutable, so when you concatenate two strings, a completely new string is created in memory and the contents of the other two strings are copped into the new string. Do this several thousand times and you can start to see the inefficiency that this causes.

Most other languages offer a “string buffering” classes like StringBuffer in Java and StringBuilder in C#. As far as I know, PHP doesn’t offer a facility like this, so using output buffering could be the way to go, but only in this specific case (where you’re concatenating lots of strings). In general, output buffering will be much slower, as you saw in your other example.

I’d also note that the reason the ‘include’ method was so much slower in the second example because it was executed in the PHP interpreter context, which goes MUCH slower than simply reading in the bytes (because PHP has to actually evaluate the file to see if there is any code that needs to be executed).

At any rate, those are my thoughts on output buffering. There are certainly places where it is useful, but in general it doesn’t improve performance at all.

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Astropeg

Astropeg — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 20:56:48 +0000

Thanks for taking the time to respond Ozh, I will get to the bottom of this because I don’t want to ever be on a wordpress admin page without your plugin. It should be part of the core of wordpress as many folks have mentioned on other forums. It truly is my favorite plugin and every time I see the menu bar I smile! Thanks again.

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Ozh

Ozh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:16:51 +0000

Astropeg » the thing is: the plugin cannot “affect” the public part. It is coded so that it simply does not load when viewing the public part. Thus, I’m afraid I can’t help, sorry.

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Astropeg

Astropeg — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:53:30 +0000

This is all very strange then. I am not sure how 2 different sites could be affected the same way when the plugin was installed and uninstalled.

Do you have any suggestions? Can you help me? I would really like to be able to use your plugin on the 2 mentioned sites.

I do appreciate you taking the time to help me.

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Ozh

Ozh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:29:50 +0000

Astropeg » if you deactivate the plugin, it’s deactivated for good. It does not “affect” code. Plus, my plugin does nothing to the public part of the blog. Actually it does not even load in memory when you’re not viewing the admin area.

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Astropeg

Astropeg — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 12:00:23 +0000

Is it possible that the plugin may have affected some of the code in the Theme/template files? I do not know what to look for because I am not a code writer/webmaster and I may not be communicating this correctly but it seems that the size of the image files for the header and top of the page have been affected. I am using the Thesis theme as well as custom headers.

Again, 2 sites were affected in the same way following the installation of the plugin:
http://mattpapanek.com/
http://lunafengshui.com/

Thank you again for your time Ozh!

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Astropeg

Astropeg — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:51:26 +0000

Thank you for responding so fast Ozh!

Actually, there were no problems with the public view of the page display on either site until I installed the plugin. This seems odd to me since the plugin is for admin page functionality.

When I installed the plugin, I did not do anything else except select a color for the menu bar and check the box to hide the speech bubbles. I did nothing else but install your great plugin.

I really love this plugin and am hoping to find a solution.

Thank you again for your fast response and your help! Oh, and I wanted to donate but the paypal page came up in French…

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Ozh

Ozh — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:22:28 +0000

Astropeg » “After uninstalling the plugin, the page display is still affected.” so obviously my plugin does not interfere with whatever you call “affecting the page display”

Comment on Admin Drop Down Menu: More Goodness & an API by Astropeg

Astropeg — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 10:16:14 +0000

I need some help… I am not a code writer/programmer/webmaster (though I am learning :-)

I installed the drop down menu on several websites. I love it but it is affecting the page display of 2 of the websites. One is: http://mattpapanek.com/

My webmaster is not familiar with the plugin and suggested just uninstalling it. After uninstalling the plugin, the page display is still affected. This has happened on 2 different sites. I reinstalled the plugin.

Before going back to the webmaster, I would like to know if there is a solution because, well, I love this plugin!

Any help would be greatly appreciated!