WPML 3.2 includes a few major updates and performance improvements. We are seeing SQL queries reduced by up to 75% and are looking for more test cases, to tune the performance the best we can.
Part of our work on WPML includes optimization for SQL queries. When you run a site on your localhost, the number of queries is less critical. However, production sites that have a lot of traffic and may have an external SQL server, will benefit a lot from reduced queries.
We use three test sites for our optimizations. These include a tiny site, a medium site and a huge site. Each helps with different optimizations. The tiny site represents a typical ‘brochure’ website with several pages. The huge site represents a busy e-commerce site with many posts (products). The ‘medium’ site is somewhere in the middle. In our journey, we find different optimizations that are more significant for each of these configurations.
So far, our testing shows the following numbers, when comparing WPML 3.2 to 3.1.9.4:
- Home page in default language: about 20% fewer SQL queries.
- Home page in another language: 20 to 75% fewer SQL queries.
- Single page (about page) in default language: about 15% fewer SQL queries.
- Single page (about page) in another language: 20 to 80% fewer SQL queries.
- WP Dashboard: about 15% fewer queries.
Of course these figures depend on the complexity of the site.
Does this reduction in the number of queries also implies faster execution time? Generally yes, but it really depends. If you have a monster CPU and tiny database, your MySQL server works from RAM and you can hardly feel normal queries. If you are on a typical web server, with a big database and a lot of traffic, you’ll see these fewer queries directly translate into less CPU load.
Download WPML 3.2 Beta
The current WPML 3.2 beta is available for Multilingual CMS account holders. Log in to your WPML account and click on Downloads. Scroll to the bottom and you will see ‘CMS Beta Package’. Download it and unzip. You will receive ZIP files of all of WPML’s components in the beta version.
Please keep in mind that this code is not yet ready for production sites. We would love it if you can give WPML 3.2 beta a spin on a dev site, but don’t use it on production sites yet.
WPML 3.2 is now in QA and we are handling corner cases. As soon as it’s ready, you’ll receive it directly to your WordPress admin.
We Want to Test WPML’s Performance on Your Site
We want to make sure that these improvements work on a large variety of sites.
We’re looking for small to medium sites to do comparison tests on. We’ll test with 3.1.9.4 and 3.2 and make sure that these speed improvements work on all sites.
If you can help, we need complete Duplicator dumps of your site so we can test these sites locally. Please leave your comments and we’ll get back to you privately.