Oh the Irony
I just wrote a quick plugin to help someone solve a WordPress performance issue. There’s definitely something wrong with this picture. I mean, I’ve been supporting LightPress and made the switch precisely because of performance issues (the templates are nifty too), didn’t I?
Granted I only found out about the problem because of Ludo’s outraged post on LightPress.org. Blaming MySQL is certainly a new twist on resolving performance problems, even if it’s utterly wrong in this case. My position on database queries: design them properly (that includes the underlying tables too) and they will work like a charm no matter database engine you use; write them poorly and thou shalt get bitten. MySQL and Oracle will both grind to a standstill with an unoptimized query that joins poorly designed tables.
It will be interesting to see what comes out in the end. Is it a plugin? Is it a WordPress query that scales badly? In any case, I know I don’t have to worry about the same problem over here in LightPress-land.