Wikimedia Platform Engineering/Site performance and architecture

The Site performance and architecture team (originally Incremental architectural improvements) was a subteam of Wikimedia Platform Engineering from June 2012 to 2015. Its responsibilities are now covered by the Performance Team and MediaWiki Platform Team.

Team

• Tim Starling (Lead)
• Ori Livneh
• Aaron Schulz
• Antoine Musso
• Andrew Garrett

Mission

"Various initiatives geared toward improving site responsiveness, decreasing resource consumption, and/or improving site maintainability."

Rationale

Performance is important for user engagement.

Many small architectural changes and improvements are being done all of the time without a lot of fanfare. This is a general activity area where we communicate changes made along these lines.

Status

Weekly and monthly status updates at Site performance and architecture/status.

Roadmap

April-June 2013

• JobQueue improvements
• Eqiad migration wrapup
  • Migrate fenari to tin.eqiad.wmnet
  • Migration to Ceph - still running sync scripts, possible split-brain issues with memcache
  • Migrate hume to terbium.eqiad.wmnet

October-December 2013

• New deployment system (replacing scap)
• Caching improvements
  • bug 46770 - Rewrite jobs-loop.sh in a proper programming language
  • bug 27935 - Redirect to canonical encoding
  • bug 22390 - When a commons image is updated, update the pages that use it
  • bug 17577 - Include version in thumbnail URL
  • bug 5382 - Queue refreshLinks jobs on template deletion
  • bug 48835 - Separate Cache-Control header for proxy and client
• bug 15583 - Enable importing across all Wikimedia projects
• bug 47490 - resetUserTokens.php not usable on large wikis

January-December 2014

• HHVM AKA HipHop
  • Implement Lua extension
  • Develop prodution configuration

2015

Save Timing improved by 20-40%

• HTTPS by default and SPDY.
• Save Timing.