Manual:$wgMiserMode

Performance hacks and limits: $wgMiserMode
Enable/disable database-intensive features
Introduced in version:Before 1.1.0
Removed in version:Still in use
Allowed values:(boolean)
Default value:false

Miser mode is a mode intended to reduce load on server farms running a large number of wikis. It is enabled on all WMF wikis.

Details

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If true, disable database-intensive features, so that they can be managed/controlled separately if desired. This includes reading special pages marked as expensive from the cache instead of regenerating them every time they are requested.

With $wgMiserMode set to true, this means that the special pages managed by this flag will only be updated when explicitly made to update. For example, setting up a cron-job to call /maintenance/updateSpecialPages.php or using Extension:RefreshSpecial .

The other disabled features are...

MediaWiki version:
1.23
Gerrit change 109710
MediaWiki versions:
1.33 – 1.34
Gerrit change 294774
  • Disables the {{REVISIONID}} magic word in content namespaces as defined with $wgContentNamespaces as of gerrit:294774. It is substituted by a single dash after saving the page.
MediaWiki version:
1.35
Gerrit change 570985
  • Disables the {{REVISIONID}} magic word in subject namespaces as of gerrit:570985. It is substituted by a single dash after saving the page.

For reference, this very wiki uses miser mode. You can tell if a wiki has miser mode enabled via the meta=siteinfo API module.

update.php

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MediaWiki version:
1.18

This configuration option disables update.php in 1.18.0 (and only 1.18.0. Subsequent releases will not use this option for that purpose), requiring one to use --force to run that script. Very very very large wikis (like Wikipedia) may need to have more careful upgrade process than the maintenance script does, but most sites would not have to worry about this.


See also

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