This week in caching: the autoloaded options trap

This week in caching: the autoloaded options trap

A WordPress-specific killer with concrete cleanups:

— Old blog — 14MB of expired transients sat in autoloaded wp_options, loaded on every request; cleaning them and moving live transients to Redis cut baseline memory per request from 90MB to 38MB.
— Agency client — a plugin wrote 60k orphaned transient rows; the options query alone was 380ms. After cleanup + persistent object cache, it vanished from the slow query log.
— Store — capping autoload to