Whether our goal is to deliver pages faster or serve more pages from the same server, most of us want WordPress and the code we write for it to run faster. But how does one go about improving the performance of a complicated and expansive project like WordPress? The goal for this workshop is to learn how to identify and resolve performance issues in WordPress, and to build our intuition for software performance. It will cover a range of topics including causes for performance issues, methods for assessing and measuring performance, and insight into the role that today’s complicated processors play in this puzzle. Themes covered include: how modern processors run code differently than we expect; profiling with Xdebug and SPX; benchmarking; methodology for caching; streaming interfaces; the impact of API sequencing; and the outsized role design plays in avoiding performance traps.