Deploying HTTP/2 support to the Wikimedia CDN significantly changed how browsers negotiate and transfer data during the page load process. We found regressions in performance during the transition and are sharing the lessons we learned.
Preview popups are common and requires careful scripting and styling; they can generate useful learning about performance as a reference for other front-end tasks.
The story of how we decided to commission the implementation of Paint Timing API, a feature that lets us observe web performance from an end-user perspective. This web browser feature tells us at what point in time content started to appear on the screen for a visitor.
We have been collecting microbenchmark scores for over a year. This lets us see the long-term evolution of our audience as a whole. The information gives us an idea of how fast device/operating system/browser environments improve on their own.
WikimediaDebug is a set of tools for debugging and profiling MediaWiki web requests in a production environment. WikimediaDebug can be used through the accompanying browser extension, or from the command-line. This post highlights changes we made to WikimediaDebug over the past year, and explains more generally how its capabilities work.
This week saw the conclusion of a project that I’ve been shepherding on and off since September of last year. The goal was for the initialisation of our asynchronous JavaScript pipeline (at the time, 36 kilobytes in size) to fit within a budget of 28 KB – the size of two 14 KB bursts of Internet packets.