Hello all,
Earlier this morning, we made some good progress towards a faster
VisualEditor experience by loading the HTML from
https://rest.wikimedia.org/,
the REST content API that entered beta production a bit over a week ago
[1]. Preliminary data shows a drop of mean client HTML load times by close
to 40% from about 1.9 seconds to 1.2 seconds.
The reasons for this speed-up are primarily
-
a reduction in HTML size by 30-40%, achieved by storing page metadata
separately in RESTBase [2], and
-
storing (rather than caching) the HTML of all Wikipedia articles, thus
eliminating expensive cache misses.
So far we have enabled this optimization on all Wikipedias. Other projects
with VisualEditor support will follow over the next week. There are also a
lot more optimizations in the pipeline. Eventually, we hope to completely
eliminate the need to re-load the page for editing by using the same
Parsoid-generated HTML for regular page views.
While many people helped to make RESTBase and the content API a reality
(see the original announcement [1]), I want to specially call out Marko
Obrovac for doing much of the integration work with MediaWiki and the
VisualEditor extension.
I hope that you enjoy the newly faster VisualEditor experience as much as
we do!
Sincerely --
Gabriel Wicke
Principal Software Engineer, Wikimedia Foundation
[1]:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-March/081135.html
[2]:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/RESTBase