Most of the time, the ordering implied by revision ID number and the
ordering implied by revision timestamp are the same. Differences occur
mainly when revisions are imported from another wiki, however there may be
other situations that can cause this.
The database queries that were formerly used to handle the rvstartid and
rvendid parameters were found to be very inefficient.[1] As of Gerrit
change 349448,[2] these parameters are now equivalent to using the
timestamps of the corresponding revisions for rvstart and rvend.
This change should be deployed to WMF wikis with 1.30.0-wmf.1, see
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.30/Roadmap for the schedule.
[1]:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T163495#3200490
[2]:
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/349448/
--
Brad Jorsch (Anomie)
Senior Software Engineer
Wikimedia Foundation