I was trying different kinds of image related plugins, and decided to check how much overhead each one of them have when just activated. What I did was upload some plugins, and before I timed it I just activated it. Nothing more. The plugins are activated but not configured or in use.
These are the plugins testet:
- Flickr Manager 2.0.2 by Trent Gardner
- Flickr Photo Gallery 0.96 by Joe Tan
- flickrRSS 4.0 by Dave Kellam
- Flickr Tag 2.2.4 by Jeff Maki
- NextGEN Gallery 0.95 by the NextGEN DEV-Team
- SimpleFlickr 3.0 by Josh Gerdes
- Wordpress Media Flickr 1.0.3 by yu-ji
- WP-Highslide 1.28 by Jesse Heap
- Post Thumb Revisited 2.3 by Alakhnor
- FAlbum 0.7.1 by Elija Cornell
- Wordpress Imager 0.9.5 by Alexander Beutl.
| Plugin | Average page load time | Added page load size | DB Queries |
|---|---|---|---|
| No plugins | 980 ms | 16 KB | 15 |
| Flickr Manager | 3.72 s | 75 KB 1 | 16 |
| Flickr Photo Gallery | 1.35 s | 0 KB | 15 |
| flickrRSS | 1.37 s | 0 KB | 15 |
| Flickr Tag | 6.47 s | 166 KB | 27 |
| NextGEN Gallery | 4.36 s | 61 KB | 16 |
| SimpleFlickr | 1.88 s | 9 KB | 15 |
| Wordpress Media Flickr | 971 ms | 0 KB | 15 |
| WP-Highslide | 2.82 s | 49 KB | 15 |
| Post Thumb Revisited | 1.02 s | 0 KB | 15 |
| FAlbum | 1.07 s | 0 KB | 16 |
| Wordpress Imager | 2.41 s | 42 KB | 15 |
As you can see, some plugins behave and take no unnecessary overhead when not in use, while others add to the pageload no matter if they are in use or not. Also, since these plugins are all image related, the size of the images themself are of course added to this when in use!
- Flickr Manager: The default option for image viewer is Lightbox, but if you configure it to use Highslide the added size is 31 KB ↩
