Reply To: What's faster?

• John Huebner

• January 19, 2017 at 10:47 am

Using get_post_meta($id); may not be faster for the gallery and images. A gallery stores an array of image ID and all the extra stuff that ACF returns in the array is not stored. So this will only marginally improve performance.

When ACF returns the array it does a query to get all of the attachment posts in the array. It then does quite a bit of work to get the values that it returns in the array, including calling several WP functions that do additional queries.

doing get_post_meta() at this point won’t improve performance because it’s already ACF has already done most of the queries.

In the case of a gallery field I think something like this would be faster

// the second false returns the unformatted value
$gallery_array = get_feild('gallery', false, false); // 1 query
foreach ($gallery_array as $id) {
  get_post_meta($id); // 1 query for each image
}
// at this point all meta data for all images 
// should be stored in the cache.
// now just use
$gallery = get_field('gallery');

Although I could be wrong with part of this, I did not follow all of the code all the way through to be sure, I think this would give you your biggest potential for performance gain.