Where is $comments array created? What file, what function?

Ahh, looks like get_comments() is going to help me, looking into it…

I won’t check “resolved” because I think the “number” LIMIT should be set from the admin panel somewhere, with some reasonable default like LIMIT 100.

Here’s the exact change I made, in comment-template.php, after “else if”. For blogs that don’t require logins, most of your traffic will see what is selected by this “else if” because there is no $comment_author most of the time. I changed to DESC to save my theme from reversing the array, but you may have a different theme. If there’s a better way to do it, let me know.

—

/** @todo Use API instead of SELECTs. */
if ( $user_ID) {
$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare(“SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND (comment_approved = ‘1’ OR ( user_id = %d AND comment_approved = ‘0’ ) ) ORDER BY comment_date_gmt”, $post->ID, $user_ID));
} else if ( empty($comment_author) ) {
$comments = get_comments( array(‘post_id’ => $post->ID, ‘status’ => ‘approve’, ‘order’ => ‘DESC’, ‘number’ => ’50’) );
} else {
$comments = $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare(“SELECT * FROM $wpdb->comments WHERE comment_post_ID = %d AND ( comment_approved = ‘1’ OR ( comment_author = %s AND comment_author_email = %s AND comment_approved = ‘0’ ) ) ORDER BY comment_date_gmt”, $post->ID, wp_specialchars_decode($comment_author,ENT_QUOTES), $comment_author_email));
}

“is any of this useful in any way?”

That option you posted doesn’t affect the memory requirement of $comments, which is my entire reason for starting this thread. The option you’re talking about only affects the pagination of newer themes, but even if you have a more updated theme, $comments still sucks up memory if you have a lot of comments.

Unless you make the change I posted, your blog loads ALL of your comments into the $comments array, which is probably not a big deal for most blogs. But I have one post with 9000+ comments and it’s costing me a lot of cash to host that particular page, so I’m looking for ways to save memory, CPU.

Update: I’m wondering if WP developers just assume high-traffic sites use some kind of cache now, allowing them to ignore things like this?

I was watching a video from WordCamp 2007 telling plugin developers to test on large datasets first. So why wasn’t get_comments tested with lots of comments?

Because this code is so bloated now (I would edit wp-includes all day long but then I could never upgrade) I’m trying wp-cache (also recommended in that same video) and the plugin works for a little while and then breaks. Then all pages stop loading until wp-cache is turned off. Submitting comments with wp-cache sometimes gives PHP errors due to missing cache files. Comments do not update until the cache refreshes (what?!)