Moving WordPress Plugin Compute to Rust FFI: An Experience Report on Sitemaps, Related Posts, and Redirects

Published 2026-09-20 · Version 5 of 6

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Experience report timing three WordPress plugin kernels (XML sitemaps, related-posts scoring, and redirect lookup) as PHP fallbacks, PHP FFI into Rust cdylibs, and native Rust. On an i5-12600KF, sitemap FFI loses to PHP because of JSON marshalling; related-posts PHP is faster because it uses a weaker ranker; a redirect radix trie is about 700x faster than a linear PHP scan. Production WordPress was not cut over. Expanded A4 technical report with stdev tables and FFI architecture notes.

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PHP FFI manual www.php.net/manual/en/book.ffi.php
Sitemaps protocol www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html
WordPress Plugin Handbook developer.wordpress.org/plugins

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