Cross-posting from the mediawiki-api-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org list.
---------- Forwarded message ---------
From: Brad Jorsch (Anomie) <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org>
Date: Fri, Jun 21, 2019 at 8:30 AM
Subject: [Mediawiki-api-announce] BREAKING CHANGE: Improved timestamp support
To: <mediawiki-api-announce(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
An upgrade to the timestamp library used by MediaWiki is resulting in
two changes to the handling of timestamp inputs to the action API.
There will be no change to timestamps output by the API.
All of these changes should be deployed to Wikimedia wikis with 1.34.0-wmf.10.
Historically MediaWiki has ignored timezones in supported formats that
include timestamps, treating them as if the timezone specified were
UTC. In the future, specified timezones will be honored (and converted
to UTC).
Historically some invalid formats were accepted, such as
"2019-05-22T12:00:00.....1257" or "Wed, 22 May 2019 12:00:00 A
potato". Due to improved validation, these will no longer be accepted.
Support for ISO 8601 and other formats has also been improved. See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Timestamp for details on the formats
that will be supported.
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The actor and comment views on the wiki replicas are slowed by a need
to make subqueries against 8 other tables in order to determine
which rows should and should not be visible on the replica service. With
recent changes to the replica view schema, this problem has become much more visible.
The WMCS team has deployed a set of specialized views of these two tables that
will allow individual queries to only be slowed by a single subquery against
a related target, eg. a query for an actor mentioned in the log_actor field of
the logging table could be made against actor_logging, which will only check against
logic in the actor table--not 7 other tables that aren't related to the query.
On the flip side the actor_logging view will only have rows that are exposed
in the logging table.
For more information, see: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/News/Actor_storage_changes_on_the_Wiki_…
If other documentation about the Wiki Replicas on wikitech needs updating related to this change, we would
like your help finding it! Please let us know on IRC, phab task, email or on wiki if you find things that need
updating related to the actor and comment tables. A Phabricator task is already open to update the MediaWiki
documentation related (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T225007), but it is likely that there are bits around wikitech
to update as well.
Brooke Storm
Operations Engineer
Wikimedia Cloud Services
bstorm(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:bstorm@wikimedia.org>
IRC: bstorm_
Similar to the earlier removal of text fields from the wiki replicas for comment storage refactors in Mediawiki, we are going to remove “user text” columns from the views that are deprecated in the Mediawiki schema to prepare for when they will actually be removed upstream. The column drops are tracked and explained here https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T223406 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T223406>. The tables with names such as <tablename>_compat will not see a difference in structure. The change is scheduled for Monday, May 27th.
The fields that are dropping from the views are:
revision: rev_user and rev_user_text.
archive: ar_user and ar_user_text.
ipblocks: ipb_by and ipb_by_text.
image: img_user and img_user_text.
oldimage: oi_user and oi_user_text.
filearchive: fa_user and fa_user_text.
recentchanges: rc_user and rc_user_text.
logging: log_user and log_user_text.
Ideally, tools that connect to the replicas should gather the information from the appropriate entries in the actor table instead, again, this is similar to the change for the comment table. The data is already there for you to start using. The alternative is to try using the related <tablename>_compat table, which won’t be changing in a user-visible way at this time.
Brooke Storm
Operations Engineer
Wikimedia Cloud Services
bstorm(a)wikimedia.org <mailto:bstorm@wikimedia.org>
IRC: bstorm_
Hi!
On 2019-06-03 UTC+2 14:00 (next monday) we will be rebuilding the
cloudservices1003 server,
that holds the designate service which serves DNS request for CloudVPS and
Toolforge.
We have a backup server -cloudservices1004-, so we don't expect a lot of
downtime. But DNS queries are really fast, and there may be a lot of them that
will fail while we stabilize the DNS service.
Please reach out to the WMCS team if you need more details or have any doubts.
regards.
--
Arturo Borrero Gonzalez
Operations Engineer / Wikimedia Cloud Services
Wikimedia Foundation