Arthur Guy wrote:
Can I get some feedback from people as to the average page load time (as shown in the comment at the bottom of each page).
I have been running MediaWiki on IIS on windows and I have been getting average times of 0.5s I then installed apache on my laptop and setup MediaWiki to get data from the original database, with this setup I am getting 0.4s. The laptop isn't as good as the server and it was getting its data across the network so it shows how much better Apache is with this type of site.
What I would like to know is 0.5s or 0.4s fast or slow, what times are other people getting, and what are they running, WIMP, WAMP, LAMP, etc...
My test box at home is a 2GHz Athlon XP w/ 512 MB ram, running Ubuntu Linux (Hoary Hedgehog). Apache 2, PHP 4.3.10, MySQL 4.0.something versions shipped with Ubuntu. Figures here are given with MediaWiki 1.4 current from REL1_4 branch in CVS.
Times are measured by loading a page in Safari on another machine on the local network and reloading, then checking the comment in view source. Note that due to HTTP caching, in many browsers hitting the 'reload' button by itself will give you the exact same page back with a 304 Not Modified response; try shift+reload or ctrl+reload or cmd+reload to force a new page load.
Times will be generally be slightly slower if you load from a browser running on the server. Discard the first hit, which may be filling caches and loading code for the first time.
With Turck MMCache installed to avoid redundant compilation of PHP scripts, a page load that makes use of the parser cache (previously rendered page) or is very very short ;) takes about 0.04-0.06 seconds on this machine.
Without Turck MMCache, all the scripts have to be parsed and compiled on every hit which slows things down; it runs more about 0.14-0.17 seconds.
If you're not using Turck MMCache or the newer version EAccelerator (Turck is no longer maintained; EAccelerator is a fork of it) you really probably ought to. Note: do not turn on the experimental use of Turck's internal caching functions for MediaWiki's data cache -- that will generally fail and make things worse. Just install it and let it cache compiled PHP.
Performance for 1.4 and 1.5 should be roughly similar; 1.3 was a bit slower (and doesn't use the parser cache by default).
If you're having performance problems you should also try enabling the internal profiler ($wgDebugLogFile and $wgProfiling) to see if you can isolate something.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)