Tag Archives: review

Lighthouse – WordPress Performance Plugin Review

Like many rants, this one starts with a promise. One made by the developers of Lighthouse on their marketing page:

…optimize MySQL tables by removing all unused table space (both MyISAM and InnoDB)…

Lighthouse WordPress

All unused table space for InnoDB via a PHP plugin? Suspicious, I got my hands on a copy of the plugin to see how it accomplishes this claimed feat. Well, obviously it didn’t reclaim all InnoDB tablespace, just some of it using the OPTIMIZE TABLE method (only effective when innodb_file_per_table is set to “on” which is enabled by default in MySQL 5.6.6 and higher). The ibdata file remained untouched.

Okay, no problem, not unexpected. But then I read into some of the other code and a second, much more substantial promise:

A zero-footprint tuning plugin…

…I became pretty angry. I’ve always been a skeptic of magic optimization plugins, and Lighthouse was unfortunate enough to get my review.

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WordPress Command Line Fun

Many of you may have already met the WordPress Command Line tool called wp-cli by @scribu, the man who eats WordPress for breakfast, but my first encounter with the tool happened a couple of days ago. I don’t know how in the world I had missed its announcement 4 months ago.

wp-cli WordPress Command Line

About the tool

The WordPress Command Line tool provides a command line interface for administrative control and management, and even installation of WordPress. The tool is written in PHP and makes use of the highly flexible and powerful PHP Command Line tools library. It requires PHP CLI SAPI to be installed on the machine, which will almost always be available if you’re running WordPress on the server.

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