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.
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.
When we set out to ask Wikipedia visitors their opinion of page load performance, our main hope was to answer an age-old question: which RUM metric matters the most to users? And more interestingly, which ones matter the most to our users on our content.
Unlike most websites, Wikipedia and its sister projects are ad-free. This is actually one of the reasons why our performance is so good. We don’t have to deal with slow and invasive third-parties.
We’ve recently published research on performance perception that we did last year. The micro survey used in this study is still running on multiple Wikipedia languages and gives us insights into perceived performance.
Today we’re publishing our first report of the performance experienced by visitors of Wikimedia websites, focused on the Autonomous Systems visitors are connecting from.