Oh my golly gosh,

Is Derek Smart on Jetpack the same Derek Smart that coded up Battlecruiser?

If so been MANY moons my friend!

For those that never heard of it, Battlecruiser was an "indie" games in the days when "Indie" was damned near impossible to succeed at. BC was an IMMENSE game that suffered much criticism and much fanfare. Derek and I had quite a few discussions not that I can remember all the context of them now. But I was "all for it" (which made me unpopular at times) as I back then worked in the commercial games industry and well... "Knew the game" (the game being all that is played out other than the actual software).

In respect to JetPack, never tried it. Most WP extensions I've not tried.

Build small / build fast sounds good in practice but that paradigm either is believed and embraced or not. Its an oxymoron with PHP to begin with. PHP is a JIT on the fly compiler that is coded in C++ and compiled. By sheer nature that means there is going to be buckets of generated code that are both performance and resource hungry. I've not looked at core PHP C++ in. oh my, probably 8+ years. It was pretty C Array heavy which makes sense. Issues such as no multi-threading are sizeable hits for creating performance based applications. Its been promised for
years but just when considering implementation its pretty complex. Bringing threading to what
is essentially and interpreter engine that was not designed from the ground up to support such
mechanisms that is written in a compiled language that does support it. Its a tradeoff deal.

There is essentially if we are talking "build small build fast" we have to stick to what we can
do. In C++ its possible to build small and fast. If we compare the C++ object code to that of hand coded assembler its not fast and its not small. If we compare PHP to C++ its not fast and its
not small.

PHP based application performance can have ALOT to do with the hosting firm. There you get what you pay for or less. 98% of all hosting firms are "you get what you pay for or less". There is 2% that give you "better" for your buck and not a one of them that I have ever encountered has shared hosting.

Blaming for example Jetpack's loaded size (that doesnt mean lines of code per se, again, never looked at it) as a performance/resource degrading reason is not necessarily justifiable.

If one is using a shared host, a VPS and even come of the clouds one has no clue as to what partitioning is happening at a data center, per machine, per sub network on and on. Heck, most folks dont even know what server (hardware) is being used to host them more or less anything else and its not like their is some authoritative body that goes from data center to data center making sure every penny the customer spends on services they in fact get.

Tis' why I tell people "Dedicated server" be it managed or not. Want performance? Then start where performance begins. Otherwise its like saying, "Gee... Grandtheft Auto 6 is really slow on my Intel Dual Core 8500 but runs great on my Core i7 Alienware game rig.

Also same of local development. While Xampp, Wamp, Mamp , Flamps & Cramps are very easy to set up and get started do not bother to try gauge performance by them. Perhaps a rough estimate. There is a system running an entire slew of other code behind the scenes munching cycles.

Its best to have a "REAL SERVER" even if thats generations back. I have a DELL an older DELL
PowerEdge rack server w/ CentOS 6 on it that is used for mySQL and a Lenovo Core i3 Server
used for application development. Ahead of it (if I want simulate) I have a Intel Core Duo box
that can simulate being a connections server. All Cent OS 6.

Do really need that? (Well yes) Does everyone? No... I use Xampp as well, but if I need get down to the "grits" I can do so.

I dont for example fault Joomla for being bloated or sorta pokey given certain tasks/plugins. Joomla's code is good. On a differing platform than PHP it'd fly, literally. Joomla Ported proper to say Java with its user misinterface redesigned for administrators and everyone else can pack it in and go home in as far as "small CMS" sites go and of course hosting providers offering Java just like any other platform.

Java is harder to cope with for a hosting firm, but thats another discussion.

Joomla uses alot of object oriented code and PHP swallows resources when it comes to OOP.

I was shocked when a simple class we ported from a framework took better than 3K bytes (nearer to 4K) for instancing it .vs. C# which is was ported to was at a bit over 800 bytes. Again, flavor can vary. Some languages get heavy when using inheritance all of a sudden.

On the other side of the coin if we'd used the Entity ORM of .NET .vs. direct Database management, WHACK.

Point being, BEST performance you are going to get be that an ASP.NET application online, PHP Application online, Java no matter what, Ruby On Rails starts at the hosting platform.

If you are expecting say Wordpress with Jetpack (which again I have never used, looked at, I am going to assume Matt M. is not in tune with hiring coders that bloat code as a manner of purpose)
to run nice and zippity aye on your $4.99-$14.99 a month shared hosting account then, well, why not use a Pentium 3 to run Windows 7 on? Because its too slow? Oh... But its a whole lot cheaper to buy a Pentium 3 for $10 than a core i7 for $1000? Well... hate to tell ya this but shared hosting, VPS hosting .vs. dedicated (managed or not) is in perfect paradigm with that.

Heck from what I remember Derek Smart did Battlecruiser in Assembler. I loved (and hated) Assembler.

A playstation one cant run playstation 3 games. But if it could what happens? Slower than slow. Do we blame the game or the playstation one? I can put Windows 7 and photoshop along with Firefox and MS Office and Autocad on a Pentium 4 with a gigabyte of Ram in it. I will be waiting LOTS for it to finish swapping ram in and out on the swapfile not to mention going away for lunch waiting for Maya or Autocad render some model.

Is that the fault of Autocad's latest or Photoshops latest? They are HUGE BLOATED beasts!
But it might just be that the Pentium 4 really is the lynch pin. Maybe.

The fact a LAMP stack will happily exist on a Intel Core Duo 7500 or a 4 CPU 16 core's server is as material as Windows 7, photoshop and autocad on a P4.

Put Wordpress, Jetpack on a decent dedicated platform and go "Wow! It wasnt WP or Jetpack at all. Imagine that! I guess it was the $10 hosting"