1. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
A S Y N C H R O N O U S
W O R D P R E S S
O F F L O A D I N G H O O K E D E V E N T S TO I N C R E A S E PA G E S P E E D

2. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
T H E P R O B L E M
( D R A M AT I C T H E M E M U S I C )

3. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
• Every Time WordPress loads a page, events are fired.
• Plugins typically hook events into init, admin_init,
plugins_loaded, or save_post to fire events
• Every event takes time to complete
• Many dozens of events, all waiting to finish running,
add overhead to WordPress.

4. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
P O S S I B L E P R O B L E M S C E N A R I O S
• External API Request (Facebook/Twitter? Mailkimp?)
• Saving a Post
• Requesting information about a user when a user is
created.

5. - S O M E O N E W H O B A D LY M A N G L E D T H E Q U O T E
“Asynchronous Events are not the heroes we
want; they are the heroes we need.”
Photo Credit: V Threepio, via Flickr, Creative Commons

6. T E C H C R U N C H
A S Y N C L I B R A RY
• TechCrunch had extremely
long process times,
particularly with their
CrunchBase API.
• API calls were required to
repopulate cached results.
• Eric Mann (@ericmann) and
John Bloch (@johnpbloch)
built a library to offload tasks
to asynchronous equivalents
• Runs on `shutdown` hook
Photo Credit: Charlyn Wee, via Flickr Creative Commons

7. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
O V E RV I E W O N H O W TO U S E
• Bundle the WP_Async library in any theme or plugin and
require it. It can also be installed as a standalone plugin.
• Create a subclass that extends WP_Async_Task
• Include a prepare_data() and run_action() method
(Details in the documentation)
• Include a protected $action variable that is set to the hook
name you wish to run asynchronously.
• Hook events on wp_async_{$action} (e.g.
wp_async_transition_post_status)

8. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
R E F E R E N C E S
• TechCrunch Open Sources its WordPress Async Task Library:
http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/31/wp-async-task-our-new-
open-source-library/
• Asynchronous WordPress, by 10up: http://techcrunch.com/
2014/07/31/wp-async-task-our-new-open-source-library/
• Github: https://github.com/techcrunch/wp-async-task/
• Demo Plugin: https://github.com/technosailor/wcbalt-async-wp
• This Presentation: http://www.slideshare.net/technosailor/
asynchronous-wordpress

9. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com
A A R O N B R A Z E L L
• Sr. Web Engineer, 10up
• We’re Hiring Project Managers, WordPress/PHP Engineers
and Front End UX Engineers (http://is10uphiring.com/)
• Twitter: http://technosailor.com/twitter
• Email: aaron.brazell@10up.com
• Github: https://github.com/technosailor
• WP.org Profile: https://profiles.wordpress.org/technosailor

10. Aaron Brazell • @technosailor • www.technosailor.com