Back in 2017 I decided to move my passion project After Dark off GitHub so I could have better repo usage insights. I was surprised to learn how much faster a self-hosted VCS was compared to GitHub. Not only was GitHub limiting the useful metrics I could capture they were actually slowing down my development! Which brings me back to one of if not the most important concepts I learned as a developer after watching a talk given by Paul Irish at Fluent Conf 2012.

After giving a talk once in Bali – where I showed how to use a $5 Vultr box and Redis with Load Impact to support up to 7000 concurrent WordPress users – I was asked to help turn some of the performance optimization work demoed into a WordPress plug-in.

It’s the first of it’s kind — and like no other performance plugin to precede it. Based on initial tests it speeds up the stock Twenty Seventeen theme about 300% and I suspect time will show even greater gains for other themes. It builds on top of a performance optimization technique called Fetch Injection, enabling external scripts to download asynchronously in parallel while preserving execution order.