With 0.8.5 out of the way I think it is time for another iteration of performance measuring and improvements.

With the amount of new code there should be a few things I can do to make ZenMagick a bit faster.

One thing I’ll be looking at this time is to review the use of ‘zen-xxx’ functions. I tried to be as conservative as possible using them and in most cases there isn’t really the need other than some lazyness to write another service class.

Still, looking at the subversion files you can see that I have been experimenting with alternative init sequencenes (cutting out even more zen-cart code). This is not to drift further away from zen-cart, but to avoid loading and even executing code that is never used.

I wouldn’t expect this to work anytime soon, though. In particular, most of the mods that do work via ZenMagick plugins require the normal zen-cart init code in order to work properly.

Things I’ll be looking at are more like this:

1. Found 2 lines of code using zen_xxx()
2. zen_xxx() calls zen_yyy() and zen_zzz()
3. none of the later are used anywhere else
4. convert zen_xxx into either a service class, a new method of an existing class or a simple function

This is definitely going to improve a few things. For example, the new ZMTaxes class will help reduce database access by using internal caching (per request) and there are more cases like this.

This exercise will hopefully also give me a better idea of where most of the dependencies between zen-cart and ZenMagick are to be prepared for new releases…