XF 2.1 How much is performance impacted by each incremental add on?

[tomdav]

Apologies if this has been asked before. When making modifications how much is performance impacted by each incremental add on? For example, let's say I have 25 modifications and I create 25 add ons. Will there be a material performance impact vs. packaging them in a single add on?

 

[Aayush]

Depends on those 25 modifications that you are doing. If you are making simple template modification in an addon, then there won't be a performance hit, provided there is no I/O bound task that is required by the template modification, as template modifications are complied.
However, if you have an addon for a blog and an addon which hits the DB every time a thread or forum is loaded, then there will be a performance impact,

It would be better, if you could be specific as to what you are doing in each addon.

 

[tomdav]

To clarify, I'm curious about the overhead involved for each add on, not the add on itself. For the sake of argument assume each add on is completely independent of the other so no database queries would be saved by consolidating.

I guess what I'm asking is whether I should be concerned about breaking each and every trivial modification into a separate add on? This is desirable from a documentation perspective but not if there is a material performance cost. This article seems to imply there is a performance cost:

10 Tips on How to Speed up XenForo Forum - KeyCDN

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Every add-on increases the number of HTTP requests you have as well as download times for whatever JavaScript or CSS file they are including.

 

[Aayush]

whatever JavaScript or CSS file they are including.

This is the key here.

It is assuming that each addon is including a new JS or CSS file for which there will be a HTTP request.

If you are breaking an addon into multiple adding, that you already are using. I don't see any major performance impact on most modern servers. Indeed, if you break down addons to 25-30 addons, I assume that you'll have very negligible impact on the server CPU. However, if you go overboard with creating 1000-2000 addons, you'll see the added latency from DB to transfer all those rows of addons to the PHP script and then PHP script looping over each addon to get what it needs.

 

[tomdav]

Thanks, not knowing what overhead results from modifications done the "official" way I've rationalized direct (lazy) hacks to templates, phrases, etc. as having no overhead cost but probably should reconsider this if the savings is trivial.

 

[Aayush]

You could use template modifications. These are compiled when you save and loaded directly saving performance cost.
If you are directly editing templates then you will have a hard time installing new themes and theme updates. Sometimes even Xenforo updates.