Flame graphs arrive in WikimediaDebug
The new “Excimer UI” option in WikimediaDebug generates flame graphs. What are flame graphs, and when do you need this?
Tag: web performance
Around the world: How Wikipedia became a multi-datacenter deployment
Learn why we transitioned the MediaWiki platform to serve traffic from multiple data centers, and the challenges we faced along the way.
Perf Matters at Wikipedia in 2016
Looking back at our ups and downs.
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.
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.