[wp-hackers] Dashboard Clutter

[Mark Jaquith]

Scott Merrill wrote:

> Owen Winkler wrote:
>
>> It's also a good point that loading it up with feeds or features can 
>> cause the Dashboard to load slowly.
>
>
> The dashboard ought not pull feeds on every hit (and maybe it doesn't; 
> I haven't looked at the code).
>
> It might be nice(r) to have regular user visits activate the feed 
> query process.  So every time a visitor hits my page (or my feed(s)), 
> WordPress checks:
> * when was the last time it queried for dev news?
> * is it currently pulling a feed?
> If false for both, set a lock and then pull the feed.  When done, 
> update the last-pulled variable and release the lock.
>
> This way feeds won't get unduly pounded from any single location (at 
> least not as a result of WP!), and admins always get new-ish news 
> without waiting for their admin panels to load. 

Is there any way to do this without slowing down page loads for 
visitors?  I think not.  I ran into that problem, as I am using 
MagpieRSS to load a title/link of the latest entry of everyone on my 
blogroll.  It's about 23 sites, so 23 feeds need to be loaded and 
parsed.  The unlucky bastard who triggers a refresh gets treated to a 
20-30 second page load.  Eventually, I just wrote a PHP script to force 
a refresh of the cache, and had cron run it every 15 minutes (also, 
wrote the output to a static file, and included that, instead of having 
Magpie RSS reprocess the contents with each page load).