Sorry for the late reply, I've been out for a few days.
Right now there's no real impetus to create new action items from this
report. The purpose of gathering the data wasn't to generate this specific
report; that was just a nice incidental benefit. Obviously if in the future
we run into problems supporting the volume of regex queries that we are
getting, we now know that there's a good chance that we could have a major
impact on that volume by tracking down the source of these three regex
patterns and finding out what they are trying to do and help them to do it
more efficiently (or throttle them if necessary, though hopefully it
wouldn't come to that).
We seem to be doing okay at the moment because all these biggest users are
using queries that are reasonably efficient because they contain either
non-regex parts (like "LOC" or the full URL) or have some decent stretch of
literal text in them (like "[[en:") so we can use "trigram
acceleration"—that is, search first finds documents with character trigram
literals from the regex—and then performs the regex search over
non-regex/trigram results. This can cut down the pool of potential document
from millions to a few thousand, which is much more manageable.
—Trey
On Fri, Jun 1, 2018 at 5:22 AM, Eran Rosenthal <eranroz89(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Thanks for sharing.
This gives nice analysis from data to insights - how do we drive actions
from this report?
Do we plan to use this data to make better tools?
For example have a common pitfalls and how to avoid them: searching for
library of congress links with regex search instead of external links query
(
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=query%2Bextlinks
)
(and similar for iwlinks for interwiki links)
This can be even actively pushed to tools (either using User-Agent to
contact the tool devs, or using warnings in the API result)
On Wed, May 30, 2018 at 11:51 PM, Trey Jones <tjones(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey everyone,
As part of T195491 <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T195491>, Erik has
been looking into the details of our regex processing and ways to handle
ridiculously long-running regex queries. He pulled all the regex queries
over the last 90 days to get a sense of what features people are using and
what impact certain changes he was considering would have on users. Turns
out there are a lot more users than I would have thought—which is good
news! And a lot of them look like bots.
He also made the mistake of pointing me to the data and highlighting a
common pattern—searches for interwiki links. I couldn't help myself—I
started digging around found that the majority of the searches are looking
for those interwiki links, and the vast majority of regex searches fall
into three types—interwiki links, URLs, and Library of Congress collection
IDs.
Overall, there are 5,613,506 regexes total across all projects and all
languages, over a 90-day period. That comes out to ~62K/day—which is a lot
more than I'd expected, though I hadn't thought about bots using regexes.
Read more on MediaWiki
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:TJones_(WMF)/Notes/Survey_of_Regular_Expression_Searches>
.
—Trey
Trey Jones
Sr. Software Engineer, Search Platform
Wikimedia Foundation
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