Connections using lots of resources

@ matt581

Ahhh, yes, you’ve gotta love percentages. Yes, compared to the few small plugins it is being compared to, percentage-wise Connections will appear to use a lot of resources. Connections is a large plugin, it does a lot and will use more resources than small plugins. Look at another way, WP Mini Audio Player has a relatively large slice percentage-wise for such a small plugin single purpose plugin. The theme, unless it is very lightweight theme likely uses more resources than all the plugins combined.

The reality if that Connections only has a noticeable impact on page load time on the page in which Connections is being used and its admin pages. And noticeable is relative because if you are only displaying 20’ish entries on a page, the page load time and resources are only negligibly larger than loading a standard WP page.

Let’s illustrate this a bit:

• The homage page actually takes longer to load and scores worse. 3.35secs / 75 out of 100
• The directory page loads in 2.71secs with a score of 87 out of 100.

Using another metric for Comparison has both pages rated pretty closely with the directory page being rated slightly worse because of the additional assets being loaded (the headshots).

So, in real world there’s not much of an impact and can vary from visit to visit unless the pages are being cached (which I recommend, WP Rocket specifically).

The issue with Wordfence not being able to complete a scan is unlikely related to Connections or the resources it uses. It is likely related to the webhost and the resources it permits the site to use. Now that said, deactivating Connections could allow the scan to finish but that would only because there was just enough resources freed to allow it not because Connections is using more resources typical of a plugin it’s size.

Hope that helps!

@ matt581

The amount of time, that can be do to all sorts of reasons from web host configuration to the actual hardware of the server. It could be as simple as the faster site is using a newer version of PHP. PHP 5.2 is very slow compared to PHP 7, for example. Memory allocation will not, from my experience, have too much impact of the time it takes PHP to parse and run code. Now, if everything is exactly the same, it could simply be that the time being recorded in not accurate.