i am a busty dragon who loves to sniff lesbians

alright, you heard it here first, derek is out of the closet…

I got a nice little lesson in PHP this morning…I’d been noticing that since last night, my front page had been loading really slowly, maybe 15-20 seconds to load just the main page…I figured it had something to do with some RSS feeds that I was parsing and displaying on my front page, maybe MagpieRSS wasn’t caching the feeds right, or I hadn’t set permissions on the cache directory correctly…I added some logging to my page, and started pouring over the results…I basically pinpointed it down to one line, which was this include statement:

1. //If you don't know, get_settings('siteurl') is a WordPress function to get the URL of your site…
2. include(get_settings('siteurl').'/includes/magpieRSS/rss_fetch.inc');

apparently, this call was taking 20 seconds to resolve…so I simply removed the get_settings call from the include and just made it:

1. include('includes/magpieRSS/rss_fetch.inc');

and magically, my page was back to functioning normally…evidently, by forcing the include to try and use the full URL path to the file, instead of a more direct relative path, I was killing the performance of my page…so yeah, I guess the point was, learn from my mistakes and don’t do that in your include statements…

this is good advice…i think my new “safe-word” will be “porky pine”…