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.
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!