If you have a lot of strips and storylines, you may see a serious performance hit under PHP 5 — this is the result of a quirk in the strtotime() function. It is looking up the default timezone for your site, and that takes a moment — it’s doing that several times for each strip, multiplied by each storyline. The delay on my own site added up to about 14 seconds!

There is a solution. It only lags if the default timezone is not set on your PHP site. This is a known issue with PHP 5, and can be read about here.

For the next version of stripShow (which will be 1.6.1, a bug fix release) I’m removing the references to strtotime() from storyline initialization, as I’ve discovered they’re not necessary anyway.