Erik Moeller, 25/09/2013 07:19:
Ori Livneh has created a nice dashboard that regularly
polls the Main
Pages of a few of our projects to break down the amount of JavaScript
(and other static assets) that's loaded for an anonymous pageview of
the Main Page:
https://ganglia.wikimedia.org/latest/?r=week&cs=&ce=&tab=v&…
Wonderful graphs!
Commons currently loads more than 1MB of JavaScript. This is too much,
which negatively affects performance for our end users. Some of this
is on WMF -- JS code we've deployed that we can optimize. But it would
also be good to get community help with auditing site JS and gadgets
that are loaded by default and that can be reduced in complexity,
loaded only when needed, etc.
We'll aim to provide better debugging tools to the community in future
but wanted to point this out in case anyone already wants to take a
closer look.
Debugging and analysis tools are invaluable, however this is just an
obvious consequence of the lack of basic functionalities for Commons in
MediaWiki, which force the community to adopt local solutions via
JavaScript. Surely, big improvements can be achieved even if we forget
this for a moment, but to a degree.
The WMF can also help by dedicating some resources to requests for help
by the community in design questions about local gadgets (I believe
there are a couple requests sitting in the design list) and to lending
its JavaScript gurus for the optimisations.
Nemo