Moving WordPress Plugin Compute to Rust FFI: An Experience Report on Sitemaps, Related Posts, and Redirects
Published 2026-09-20 · Version 6 of 6 · Latest
Creators: Jermaine Harris
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.
Files
| File | Size | Actions |
|---|---|---|
01-wp-rust-ffi.pdf | 60.2 KB | ViewDownload |
01-wp-rust-ffi-supplement.zip | 95.3 KB | ViewDownload |
Sources
Upstream datasets, APIs, and references cited by this record.
- 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
Version history
Version 6 of 6 · Latest · 20 Sep 2026, 20:38 UTC