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.
Tag: web performance
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.
How we improved performance of a batch process from two days to five minutes
The Growth team recently improved the performance of a script that prepares data for usage in the mentor dashboard. Learn about how they decreased the average runtime of the script from more than 48 hours to less than five minutes.
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.
Impact of using HTTP connection pooling for PHP applications at scale
This post explores the challenges of running PHP applications at a large scale and discusses the effect of using Envoy on MediaWiki applications.
Wikimedia’s CDN up to 2018: Varnish and IPSec
The 1st of a 3 part series that will describe some of the changes, which included replacing Varnish with Apache Traffic Server (ATS) as the on-disk HTTP cache component of the CDN.
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.
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.