Machine learning: how to undersample the wrong way
Machine learning is a powerful tool, but it’s easy to use it incorrectly and draw biased conclusions, as we’ll show in this real world example.
Category: Wikimedia Performance (page 4)
Best friends forever
We use both synthetic and RUM testing for Wikipedia. These two ways of testing performance are best friends and help us verify regressions. Today, we will look at two regressions where it helped us to get metrics both ways.
Performance testing in a controlled lab environment – the metrics
One of the Performance Team responsibilities at Wikimedia is to keep track of Wikipedias performance. Why is performance important for us? In our case it is easy: We have so many users and if we have a performance regression, we are really affecting people’s lives.
Mobile web performance: the importance of the device
Let’s explore our web performance data from an angle we haven’t explored before: mobile device type.
Thumbor support for private wikis deployed
Yesterday we deployed Thumbor support for Wikimedia-hosted private wikis. While 99.9% of our traffic is for public-facing wikis, the Wikimedia Foundation hosts a number of private MediaWiki instances on the same infrastructure.
Measuring Wikipedia page load times
Here is how we measure and interpret load times on Wikipedia. Let’s also look at what real-user metrics are, and how percentiles work.
The journey to Thumbor, part 3: development and deployment strategy
Introducing Thumbor replaces an existing service, and as such it’s important that it doesn’t preform worse than its predecessor. We came up with a strategy to reach feature parity and ensure a launch that would be invisible to end users.
The journey to Thumbor, part 2: thumbnailing architecture
To understand why Thumbor is a good fit, it’s important to understand where it fits in our overall thumbnailing architecture. A lot of historic constraints come into play, where Thumbor could be adapted to meet those needs.
Improving time-to-logo performance with preload links
Thanks to a new web standard, we’ve recently deployed a small performance improvement that highlights some of the unique challenges we encounter on Wikimedia sites.
The journey to Thumbor, part 1: rationale
Making Thumbor production-ready for Wikimedia is a journey that started a year and a half ago. Let’s look at the rationale for this project.