Comments on: Building alexking.org 2.0, part 8: Too Many Plugins?

By: Susan Kledzik

Susan Kledzik — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 20:05:28 +0000

This was so helpful! Thank you!!

I digg it;)

By: tecosystems » A Couple of Quick WordPress Notes

tecosystems » A Couple of Quick WordPress Notes — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 20:17:03 +0000

[...] party Javascripts and data sources and 2.) the database hit for the local plugin (see more on that here). I wish there was a way of caching that content locally, but I think that would have to be worked [...]

By: Stop Using WordPress Plugins - Top 3 WordPress Hacks : ultimate geek girl

Stop Using WordPress Plugins - Top 3 WordPress Hacks : ultimate geek girl — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:02:53 +0000

[...] is some evidence that the more plugins you use on your WordPress installation, the slower your website will [...]

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:21:45 +0000

It sounds like you have a pretty bad plugin in there – probably just 1 is responsible for ~200 queries.

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 22:08:49 +0000

Interesting. I deactivated 14 plugins and got:

257 queries in 3.823 seconds.

14 plugins dropped and it only lost 4 queries, and added a second. I did not delete any cache plugins though…

By: Frank

Frank — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 21:45:38 +0000

On one site I run, it’s getting 261 queries in 2.532 seconds.

Is that too slow for you guys?

I’ve got 55 plugins running. I could probably get rid of 10 of them, but the others i’d like to keep, or somehow build into the theme.

By: 7 Ways to be Best Buds with an A-List Blogger! | Theres a Blog in my Soup: A Blog by Patrick Curl

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:22:01 +0000

[...] Don’t over-do the plugins or widgets.Yes you can have too many plugins. [...]

By: WordPress v. 2.2 Upgrade Exposes Cracks in the Foundation » AI3:::Adaptive Information

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 19:37:04 +0000

[...] of the number of plug-ins on WordPress performance. For example, a listing in early 2007 from Alex King’s blog seems to have the largest nucleus of discussion. The earlier consensus was that too many plug-ins [...]

By: Praveen Angyan

Praveen Angyan — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 18:20:53 +0000

I’m VERY curious about how your options page in WordPress looks like. Do the tabs under options split up into two lines? I’ve got just three plugins, but I’m always interested in how to reduce complexity of the user interface while still offering a lot of features. I think that WordPress does a great job with it’s plugins.

By: David Bradley

David Bradley — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 19:15:45 +0000

Yes, I disabled UTW too, I don’t think it really helps a site like mine at all…not sure what does help a site like mine to be honest…although I would like to know

By: Alex

Alex — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 15:31:47 +0000

Before you start doing anything like this, you should see what impact the plugin has overall and with/without changes. Removing half the code will have nearly zero affect in most cases.

By: m.e.

m.e. — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 13:04:56 +0000

@@ JAmie:

This sounds like a great idea. Newbie questions alert:

How do i check for the admin section?
And how do i include the moved plugins then – just putting them somewhere outside the plug directory and link to each of them seperately?

Would you be so kind to explain a little further or add some code to look at?

By: Jamie

Jamie — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 14:47:46 +0000

One of the actual plugins I did check on was the (now defunct) EditorMonkey. I renamed the actual plugin and created a new plugin with the name (and head information for the plugin loader). In that file, I just included a simple check if the request_uri was in the /wp-admin/ and if so it included the full EditorMonkey file. Running XDebug, I noticed about an 80k difference on peak memory usage.

This probably would be a lot of work on a lower traffic site, but on one I manage we get over 250,000 hits a day and running off 2 machines – 1 for apache and 1 for mysql. Before I did this, the server would hang alot. Since it has been done it has greatly reduced that. Another note – I never tried this with xmlrpc as we never use it. It would probably require a bit of extra coding to determine if the plugin is loaded via xmlrpc.

Basically my train of though with doing this was taking the Drupal model of “if it isn’t needed then don’t load it”. If you are on a server running op-code caching, I doubt it would really help. If you don’t have op-code caching, then it will save a lot of cycles having to compile a lot of needless code.

By: Everton

Everton — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 11:08:26 +0000

I use around 25 plugins now after doing a lot of work tracking down the big hitters and deciding whether or not I really need them.

http://www.connected[...]/12/24/1237/

The biggest drain for me was UTW, which I refused to remove until it crashed my database and I had to disable it, which made me realise I didn’t really need it.

By: Alex

Alex — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 08:20:14 +0000

Have you actually profiled the results of this? At first glance this seems like a ton of work for almost no benefit.