2017 wikitext editor performance improvements

Group:	Contributors -> Editing
Start:	2017-10-01
Team members:	David Chan, Bartosz Dziewoński, David Lynch, Sherry Snyder
Lead:	Dan Garry (product), Ed Sanders (engineering)

Background

This is a project to improve the performance of the 2017 wikitext editor.

Updates

Note: This section is currently very incomplete. Do not trust this page to be be an accurate chronological representation of events whilst it is still being drafted.

2nd March 2018

The first performance report has been published at Contributors/Projects/Editing performance. This report explains the baseline performance metrics before the changes on 16th January 2018 were made.

16th January 2018

A patch was merged to significantly reduce the time it takes for the 2017 wikitext editor to become interactive. As with the event logging changes below, it will take time for the changes to roll out, and it will be necessary to wait some time to gather enough data to perform an analysis.

See T184614 on Phabricator for additional technical details.

(Some time in) December 2017

The team reviewed a previous experiment where a temporary text widget is shown whilst the editor is loading, with a seamless transition to the normal text widget when loading is complete. The team believes that with some further work, this experiment may be able to significantly reduce the time it takes for the 2017 wikitext editor takes to become interactive, and has begun work on this.

7th December 2017

Additional event logging was added to the visual, 2017, and 2010 wikitext editors to better understand performance. The data collection will take some time to roll out to production. After that, it will be necessary to wait around a month to gather sufficient data to generate a report.

See the Edit schema on Meta-Wiki for additional technical details.