Perf Matters at Wikipedia in 2016
Looking back at our ups and downs.
Category: Performance Team
Wikimedia Performance Team
To learn more or to access our public data sets, visit https://performance.wikimedia.org.
Web Perf Hero: Valentín Gutierrez
Today we celebrate two numbers: 25% lower latency for ATS backend requests at the p75, and up to 1000X reduction of ATS disk read latency at the p999.
HTTP/2 performance revisited
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.
Profiling PHP in production at scale
We built an efficient sampling profiler for PHP. It runs continually in production on live requests, and generates trace logs and flame graphs.
Web performance case study: Wikipedia page previews
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.
How we contributed Paint Timing API to WebKit
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.
Measuring the performance of Wikipedia visitors’ devices
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.
Organizing and running a developer room at FOSDEM
For FOSDEM 2020, the Wikimedia Performance Team organized a Web Performance devroom. In this post, they share their experience.
WikimediaDebug v2 is here!
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.
Wikipedia’s JavaScript initialisation on a budget
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.