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Following extensive performance testing of WordPress’s Real Time Collaboration (RTC) feature storage strategies, the WordPress Core team has identified a clear winner for future development. After analyzing data submitted from eight diverse hosting environments, the recommended default storage approach is now the custom-table-with-transients method, promising better scalability and efficiency.
Key Takeaways
- Custom-table-with-transients storage strategy outperformed other tested methods in 6 of 7 environments.
- This approach achieved approximately 52% faster REST dispatch times compared to the legacy post-meta baseline.
- Persistent object caching drastically reduces database queries, benefiting transient-based strategies.
- Post-meta-transients showed poor performance and is not recommended as a fallback.
- Testing included a range of hosting tiers, ensuring broad applicability of findings.
Background and Context of RTC Storage Testing
Real Time Collaboration was initially slated for inclusion in WordPress 7.0 but was removed to allow further refinement. A core challenge has been identifying the most performant and scalable data storage method to support the RTC feature’s continuous synchronization needs. The four candidate storage strategies tested were:
- Post-meta (the RC2 baseline): storing RTC data directly in post meta fields.
- Custom-table: using a dedicated database table for RTC data.
- Post-meta-transients: combining post meta storage with transients for client awareness.
- Custom-table-with-transients: a dedicated table supported by an object cache-backed awareness mechanism, colloquially called the transient approach.
The test runner measured REST API dispatch times and database query counts during sustained 30-second polling intervals, simulating real-world RTC load patterns. Test submissions Cloudflare-ceo-engineer-reveals/">came from a variety of hosting setups, including shared hosting, shared hosting with Redis caching, managed cloud environments, and setups without object caching.
Detailed Performance Analysis
The aggregate data clearly favored the custom-table-with-transients approach. It was either the fastest or tied for fastest in six out of seven tested environments and never performed worse than the original post-meta baseline. On average, the custom-table-with-transients method improved REST dispatch times by about 52%, while the plain custom-table approach improved them by roughly 37% compared to post-meta.
Environments lacking a persistent object cache saw similar performance between custom-table and custom-table-with-transients, differing by only 0.05 to 0.17 milliseconds. This negligible difference highlights that the custom table schema alone provides a significant baseline improvement.
Database query counts revealed two important patterns: persistent object caches reduced transient-based strategy queries to a single database query per dispatch, while independent of caching, the custom-table schema cut queries by roughly half compared to post-meta storage. Combining these benefits, custom-table-with-transients reduces both query count and latency effectively.
Conversely, the post-meta-transients strategy showed serious drawbacks. Without persistent caching, latency nearly doubled, and one shared environment without caching exhibited a pathological code path causing dispatch times to spike past 26 milliseconds—several times slower than all other methods.
Recommended Storage Strategy and Next Steps
The custom-table-with-transients approach is now the recommended default storage strategy for continued RTC development. It provides the best balance of speed and scalability across hosting environments ranging from shared to managed cloud solutions. Its graceful degradation when persistent caching is unavailable ensures broad applicability for WordPress’s diverse user base.
This recommendation will guide the resumption of RTC development after the cleanup phase following WordPress 7.0. The team plans to explore this storage method in greater depth, focusing on further optimizations and stability improvements.
Community and Host Contributions
The testing relied on voluntary contributions from numerous hosting providers, including notable participation from Ionos, BlueHost, Kinsta, XServer, and WordPress.com. Their submissions included anonymized performance data, which was critical for producing an unbiased and comprehensive analysis.
Thanks are also extended to the core contributors who led testing, analysis, and review efforts, ensuring the findings are robust and actionable. Such community collaboration exemplifies WordPress’s open development ethos and commitment to delivering reliable features.
What This Means for WordPress Users
For developers and site operators, these results provide clear guidance on how real-time collaboration data should be stored moving forward. Agencies and plugin developers involved in RTC-related projects should prepare for the adoption of the custom-table-with-transients strategy, as it offers significant performance advantages, particularly on hosts with persistent object caches.
Site owners on shared or unmanaged hosting environments should note that the chosen strategy degrades gracefully even without persistent caching, providing a smoother user experience across diverse hosting infrastructure. Hosting providers looking to optimize WordPress RTC performance will benefit from implementing persistent object caching to maximize the efficiency gains of the recommended approach.
This outcome signals a maturation of WordPress’s RTC infrastructure, favoring a more scalable, schema-optimized storage pattern combined with modern caching techniques. The approach aligns with broader trends in WordPress Core toward modular, performant data handling, and sets the stage for more advanced real-time features in future releases.
We recommend developers keep an eye on subsequent RTC development updates and test their environments accordingly. For context, our previous core development coverage tracks related advancements in WordPress features and performance optimizations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the main advantage of the custom-table-with-transients storage strategy?
It combines a dedicated database table to minimize query counts with an object cache-backed awareness mechanism, significantly reducing REST API dispatch latency across hosting environments.
Why was the post-meta-transients approach not recommended?
Without a persistent object cache, this approach showed severely degraded performance, including latency spikes over 26 milliseconds, due to inefficient transient handling on some hosts.
How does persistent object caching affect RTC performance?
Persistent object caching reduces the number of database queries per REST dispatch to one for transient-based strategies, drastically improving response times and lowering server load.
Will the custom-table-with-transients strategy work well on shared hosting?
Yes, it degrades gracefully even without persistent caching, maintaining improved performance over legacy methods, which benefits a wide range of hosting environments including shared hosting.
