Maybe I’m still stuck in old programming styles, but I wonder whether this will slow comment processing down while the “lookup gravatar” function occurs.  Their FAQ doesn’t address that.

Dunno. I haven’t noticed a slow down so far. We’ll see what happens if the Gravatar servers go down while the page loads. Still, I believe that the pages I listed above have been using it for quite a while and since a couple of them are professional web designers, I don’t imagine they’d keep a service if it seriously impacted their site’s performance. But, we’ll see.

I’ve had Gravatars running since I first wrote the plugin and for the most part they don’t add much time to the rendering process. All that happens on your end is the plugin generates a custom img tag which links to the Gravatar servers.

When the service went down you’d be minus your gravatars, but it generally didn’t affect the rendering times. Now that Gravatars are distributed across multiple mirrors I haven’t seen the service go offline in a long time. I still plan to implement some form of caching into the plugin once I figure out how to do so properly which should further help keep things speedy.

Lastly, Neil of Neil’s World has incorporated them into his design very nicely as well.

Hi, Les. I also wondered whether the image served would revert back to my default image if the gravatar server was down. I don’t know enough about it to hazard a guess. This is a really sweet plugin. Great job, thanks!