On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 11:40 -0400, Creative Chemistry wrote:
I know There has been a small problem with performance
on large wikis
and templates that are used in hundreds of articles, or articles that
use many templates.
Am I correct in suspecting that (for wikipedia) this will be a
non-issue as soon as the next version of squid is stable? I say this
because of that feature squid will have to cache only certain parts of
the page and keep others dynamic, almost like a template system. Could
this feature be exploited to massively accelerate the rendering of
pages that use templates?
Translation of template inclusions to esi tags is not yet implemented,
and there might be some unknowns on the way. Every dynamic part
decreases performance of the squid in any case (i benchmarked up to ten
parts up to now), a page consisting of > 20 one-word templates certainly
wouldn't perform too well. On the other hand, another squid 3 for esi
rendering would very likely bring more performance than the same machine
as another apache.
I wonder if active purging is really needed for words on wiktionaries-
would a few days lag really be a problem? If not, an inline template
thing that doesn't translate to esi tags and is updated the next time
somebody either forces a refresh or the squid maxage is reached might be
good enough. I'd expect something like this to perform better than pages
consisting of >10 templates, a benchmark should be a good idea.
Apart from that, i have the feeling that something more specialized/
structured might be needed for wiktionaries. Import of existing
databases and export in something like the dict format could make the
project more useful.
I know that the problem of updating these templates
still exists, but
something is something, no?
This would actually get much easier because only one purge would be
necessary to update all instances of this template, the pages that
include them wouldn't need to be purged.
Many things are prepared for esi integration already, the remaining work
might not be all that much if all goes according to plan. It's on my
todo list for 1.4, however i'll do a bit less for a while- a small break
after all the 1.3 debugging is very welcome ;-)
Gabriel Wicke