[@fabifott Participant 9 years ago]

@johnjamesjacoby thats not true, WP has a “polyfill” for autoloading, and actively uses it on every request, even on legacy PHP 5.2. So autoloading is officially supported.

These are first numbers about the impact of an unconfigured bbPress on a fresh WP server response time:

PHP 5.6 + opcache : +35 % SRT
PHP 7.0 + opcache : +28 % SRT
PHP 7.1 no opcache: +28 % SRT

As you can see bottleneck is loading and parsing. Note that the speedup of opcache in PHP 7 is about 6x.