[wp-hackers] Improving performance for lots of comments

[Casey Bisson]

Roger,

I've faced similar problems elsewhere. The solution I used at the time was to capture the comment markup and save it as meta on the post. In most cases the template would fetch the markup from the post meta rather than generating it fresh. 

Any time a comment was added or removed, etc, the cache was deleted and the list regenerated. 

The performance improvement for posts with hundreds or thousands of comments was ten to 20 seconds. 

Since then we've shifted to paged comments, though because of how the comment walker class works, we still suffer many of the performance affects related to iterating all the comments that we did previously. 

Another important aspect to consider is gravatars. 1000 gravatars can take many tens of seconds to load in the browser. Lazy loading those has a huge performance effect. 

--Casey Bisson

> On Sep 30, 2013, at 4:23 PM, Roger Chen <developer at rogerhub.com> wrote:
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> One of my WordPress pages has 2,000+ comments and when I visit it, it can
> take 5-6 seconds to load. Of course, this isn't a problem for visitors
> because a cached version gets served, but it is still annoying to have to
> wait that long for all of the comments to render. I don't want to break the
> comments into pages either, since all of those comments are a huge SEO
> boost.
> 
> I have removed cut down my comments template to the bare minimum, but the
> comment markup loop still takes too long. I wish there were some way for
> WordPress to automatically cache the markup for past comments so that every
> time a new comment is posted, it only needs to generate markup for new
> comments.
> 
> Does anyone have experience with something like this?
> 
> Roger
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