=== Faster Smilies === Contributors: johanee Tags: performance Requires at least: 2.5 Tested up to: 2.7 Stable tag: 1.0 Make WordPress posts 20-50% faster, in one step. Not needed for 2.8+. == Description == On posts and pages with comments the most timeconsuming part in page creation is translating the smilies to images! This has now been fixed in WordPress 2.8-bleeding-edge, but if you are not using that (and in production you probably shouldn't, yet!), this plugin gives you the speedup anyway. It replace smilies_init with a new one that constructs a more efficient regular expression, resulting in 10 ggr faster handling of smilies replacement. Note: it uses the 'e' modifier to preg_replace to avoid patching any core files. Not all hosts allow this. == Performance == A page with 25 comments on an otherwise empty Wordpress 2.7 got created on average 28% faster! Profile of filters on 2.6.5 without plugin on a page with 403 comments: Total: 7.052s, Filters/Actions: 5.856s (83%), Db: 0.033s (0.5%) 1. convert_smilies (calls: 403, total time: 3.911s (55.5%)) ... Profile with plugin: Total: 3.439s, Filters/Actions: 2.174s (63.2%), Db: 0.036s (1%) ... 4. convert_smilies (calls: 403, total time: 0.357s (10.4%)) ... More than 50% faster! == Installation == 1. Download and extract plugin files to a folder in your wp-content/plugin directory 2. Activate the plugin through the WordPress admin interface 3. Enjoy == Frequently Asked Questions == = My host does not allow the 'e' modifier to preg_replace()! What do I do? = Wait for 2.8, or if you really want to you can apply the patch from http://trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6464