In December 2019, we replaced the original version of Parsoid, written in JavaScript, with a version written in PHP, the primary programming language of MediaWiki. This new version, called Parsoid/PHP, is roughly twice as fast on most requests as the original version Parsoid/PHP brings us one step closer to integrating Parsoid and other MediaWiki wikitext-handling code into a single system.
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.
Over the past six months we deployed a new technology that sped up Wikipedia’s backend application, reducing the median page-saving time for editors from about 7.5 seconds to 2.5 seconds.