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 ↩
6 Comments
Interesting post, I’m assuming the overhead for Flickr Manager was using Lightbox as the image viewer in your options panel. If you switch to using Highslide it should drop to approximately 16kb as it uses a packed version.
You’ve given me food for thought though, because as it stands there’s no way of disabling the image viewer completely.. Next release will include this though.
Thanks,
Trent
You are partly correct. I configured Flickr Manager to use Highslide and it added 31 KB to the page load size.
Interesting thoughts.
There are not many ways to get stuff included only if the post contains stuff.
I will anyway do this with my whole JS stuff until 1.0 release of WordPress Imager but there is no good way to do it with the CSS Files - they shouldn’t be added to the document body - but of course could be disabled by default…
I will off course take your thoughts into consideration while the Imager is on its way out of beta.
Alex
Very useful experiment. I agree Trent - reducing to the packed version of highslide will save on the page load size and page load time.
On a related note, Charles Proxy (http://www.charlesproxy.com/) is a very useful tool for determining load bottlenecks and helping optimize load time.
Very interesting.
I guess checking the option to use highslide with Post-Thumb will higher the load size.
Probably.. I haven’t tested it out yet. The reason for this test was to se the load on the default not-configured state of the plugins.
If I get the time and the energy I will configure the plugins and use them as intended and check the overhead then
Should be interesting.
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