eimermusic

Ok, boring one-man conversation but I can’t let this go and just go to bed.

Here is the answer fully and truly put to rest.

from php.net

Warning
Please do not use any of the timezones listed here (besides UTC), they only exist for backward compatible reasons.

Besides various named cities around the world WordPress lists a number of general timezones relative to UTC. WordPress installed to UTC and I simply selected one down for UTC+1 which is my timezone… except that the values for the UTC-relative timezones are the “Etc/GMT” kind listed on the linked page. If I scroll up to “Stockholm” (Sweden) instead… weekdays are calculated correctly.

So, don’t use the “general” timezones… why they are listed is not for me to guess.

Furhter details suggest it IS a problem with WordPress. At least as it behaves on my server.
(An Ubuntu 8.10, nginx, php5.2.4 apt package + eaccelerator)

in any plain old php file on my server:
date('w', mktime(0, 0 , 0, '06', 1, '2009')) // aka: date('w', $unixmonth)
will return 1 since june of 2009 begins on a Monday (At least according to Google Calendar).

Inside WordPress is returns 0. I echoed it on the line just above where the padding is calculated, just to check)
No idea why, though.

I deactivated all (4) plugins I have but still the same result.

It appears to be worse. At least on my server, the calendar display is a mess for wny setting other than the week starting on a Sunday. Since I can?t be the first WordPress user to change from Sunday I imagine the problem might be something with my server. If it was a proper WordPress bug it would have been caught by now.

So, what can I check? Any suggestions?

I found two ways of dealing with this…

As a WP-noob I did not expect WP to apply all filters to the whole content just for the purpose of generating an excerpt. But this is exactly what WP does. For some filters this is probably a good thing but it does waste a lot of processing for large posts.

The simply fix is to put some test into the excerpt field of the post. Adding a manual excerpt avoids this extra filter parsing processing. Simple enough once I realised it would make a difference.

So, all is well again and request times are down by 90%. ??