Performance: localization

[haroldangenent]

WordPress localization is quite heavy. After #740 and #739, it would be about 60-70% of each page load, with server load getting higher when using more plugins (more .mo files to read).

Is this worth it? What would be some good alternatives?

The code below would turn off loading all localization files, for testing purposes:

add_filter('override_load_textdomain', '__return_true');

[haroldangenent]

Some first ideas:

• Don't localize the theme with translatable strings (English by default)
• Localizeable websites (e.g. Multilingual websites) could have some localization settings in the back-end

[haroldangenent]

This issue is probably a bit broader than this theme, but I'll be using this repo as a discussion platform, since it highly affects Sphynx.

[sboerrigter]

Isn't Varnish solving all these problems (also #739, #740 an #742)?

[luukdv]

@sboerrigter Only for the front-end. During development, a faster website means faster development.

[haroldangenent]

@sboerrigter Varnish doesn't 'solve' this problems, instead it masks them. On production this is fine, except for the high server load when a page or back-end needs to be generated. But during development, this becomes a serious issue. We actually disable 'bulky' plugins most of the time to increase development speed, but the theme could also improve performance (since it's about 50% of the page load right now).