BuddyPress.org

@synaptic not a stupid question – always a good idea to improve performance. That said, removing comments isn’t where you should start.

1. Try minifying your scripts that haven’t already been minified.
2. Run your site through a tool such as tools.pingdom.com to identify all of the unnecessary resources your page is using – and remove them where appropriate
3. Deactivate unused plugins and so on…

Some more ideas:

a) Lazy loading of images on long pages
b) Defer loading of javascript

So many ways to improve performance – cutting back on comments, though, isn’t a way I’d recommend.

I agree with what the folks above have said. You could probably shave a few milliseconds off of the time it takes for the PHP interpreter to compile BP into bitcode. If you’re serving billions of pageviews, this might be worthwhile. But generally, there are far more effective ways to increase performance. @henrywright-1 makes some good suggestions. Look first at the items that are being delivered to the user: images, javascript, etc. Then, look at ways to speed up the loading of WordPress by getting rid of unneeded plugins, etc (that actually *do* take appreciable time to load).

Good luck!