On 6/27/06, mdd4696(a)gmail.com <mdd4696(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all,
I'm curious to know exactly what the risk is from editing highly used
templates. There are several archive header templates on enwiki which
could potentially be used on many, many pages, and I want to ensure
that if I make a modification to one of them that it doesn't have any
ill effects.
If I make one edit to a template used on many infrequently visited
pages, would that cause issues?
In principle, the worst possibility is a bit of extra slowness for a
little while, as some pages have to be recached. If the pages are
infrequently visited (as the vast majority of non-article space stuff
is, comparatively--remember that there are far more readers than
editors), then this slight extra slowness will be spread out over a
longer period of time, becoming less noticeable. How much this extra
slowness amounts to has never been calculated, to my knowledge; it
could be so small as to be unnoticeable. And certainly an isolated
edit is no problem: at worst, it's the load equivalent of making an
edit to every page the template is included in, which wouldn't
realistically increase the load on servers that handle something on
the order of ten thousand page views a *second*.
If there's any reasonable purpose served by editing the template,
there's no reason to hesitate. If something puts too much load on the
servers, the devs will edit the software so that you can't do it or
it's not a problem; see, for instance, recategorizing templates (which
is handled in a job queue rather than being executed right away) or
transcluding templates in sigs (they're automatically substed). Devs
handle the backend, don't worry about it.