wp_options autoload, ranked by size

The total autoloaded payload is a single number that predicts a large fraction of baseline request time, and almost nobody knows theirs.

$ wp option list --autoload=on --format=json 
    | jq -r '.[] | "(.option_value|length)t(.option_name)"' 
    | sort -rn | head -5

$ wp db query "SELECT SUM(LENGTH(option_value))/1024 AS kb
  FROM wp_options WHERE autoload='yes'"
kb
3184.44

# healthy: under ~800. this site is four times that.

Tracking the figure over time is more useful than the one-off cleanup, because it identifies the deploy that introduced a regression rather than the accumulated state. It is also a good proxy metric for plugin quality when evaluating something new — installing it on a copy and measuring the delta takes five minutes and is more informative than the reviews. The cost is not only the query but unserialising several megabytes into PHP arrays on every request.