wp_page_menu function is very inefficient

[whawker]

I use wp_page_menu() to build my site's primary menu.

The MySQL query this creates, selects all the columns from the wp_posts table.

One of these columns is post_content. This means that when I create a menu, I am pulling massive amounts of data (the body text) from the DB which I will never (or very unlikely to) use. This adds a massive overhead which is killing my bandwidth.

Through my own investigations I have found that a menu can be built using only these columns from wp_posts

ID, menu_order, post_title, post_name, post_parent, post_type

This is much more efficient, but I do not feel I know the WordPress code base well enough to contribute to the core.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Related: #15459

[MisdaX]

first attempt without breaking existing functionality

[MisdaX]

I tried to extend the core functions without breaking the current functionality.

• wp_page_menu() has a new argument "optimize_query" which is delegated to wp_list_pages()
• wp_list_pages() has a new argument "optimize_query" which defines a minimum set of wp_posts columns (for get_pages()) to serve the function (if true)
• get_pages() has a new argument "restrict_columns" which restricts the number of of fetched columns from the database (if not empty)

Profiling with xdebug shows faster execution time and a dump of memory_get_peak_usage() shows lower memory consumption on my installation.

[MisdaX]

fixed some issues with formatting and comments -> replaces first attempt

[pbearne]

get_post now uses wp_query so this approach doesn't work so closing as won't fix