On 12/01/11 09:31, Aryeh Gregor wrote: > On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 5:21 PM, Tim Starling <tstarl...@wikimedia.org> wrote: >> I've always been opposed to that policy. > > Are you aware of the completely insane things users have sometimes > established as conventions or even policies based on nonsensical > server-load grounds?
Yes. I know that the main reason for the existence of the "don't worry about performance" page is to make such policy debates easier by elevating elitism to the status of a pseudo-policy. It means that sysadmins don't have to explain anything, they just have to say "what I say goes, see [[WP:PERF]]." My issue with it is that it tends to discourage smart, capable users who are interested in improving server performance. Particularly in the area of template design, optimising server performance is important, and it's frequently done by users with a great amount of impact. It's not very hard. I've done it myself from time to time, but it's best done by people with a knowledge of the templates in question and the articles they serve. Taking a few simple measures, like reducing the number of arguments in loop-style templates down to the minimum necessary, can have a huge impact on the parse time of very popular pages. I've given general tips in the past. > Users are just not > going to be able to figure out what causes server load without > specific instruction by sysadmins. I think this is an exaggeration. When I optimise the parse time of particular pages, I don't even use my sysadmin access. The best way to do it is to download the page with all its templates using Special:Export, and then to load it into a local wiki. Parsing large pages is typically CPU-dominated, so you can get a very good approximation without simulating the whole network. Once the page is in your local wiki, you can use whatever profiling tools you like: the MW profiler with extra sections, xdebug, gprof, etc. And you can modify the test cases very easily. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
