post.php hack

Since the v2.0 days, WP sites with a lot of pages and/or child posts exhibit a significant delay when opening a page for editing or creating a new page. I’ve seen complaints that this delay can be several minutes.

On some otherwise high-end hosting (RackSpace CloudSites, e.g.,) because of a time-limit on process — the load-balancer has a limit of 30-seconds — opening a post for editing can time out with the White Screen of Death.

There is a fairly simple ‘hack’ that fixes this (see below).

I would like to know what problems this hack might cause if anyone familiar with WP code can weigh in.

In ~/wp-includes/post.php on about line 3232, bypass the page ID check if it is a parent page:

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