On Fri, Apr 25, 2014 at 7:32 PM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
All but the imageinfo call are cached on Varnish for one day. (Caching
imageinfo for more than a few minutes would be more problematic as users
would expect to see changes to image description etc. immediately.)
Merging filerepoinfo/imageinfo/imageusage/globalusage into a single API
call should be possible even on the client side, but it would mean that we
cannot cache anything; not sure how that affects server load (I suppose the
API has its own caching mechanism, but even that must have some overhead
compared to Varnish). Similarly, merging multiple calls to the same API
would be possible but would make caching mostly useless.
Making 12 API calls means you run into browser connection limits[1]. The
overhead for each discrete request is substantial as well. I strongly
suspect that combining the calls would substantially improve real-world
user experience, but rather than relying on hunches I'd really like to see
a controlled experiment that compares the two approaches. Would it be
difficult to make MMV's code choose one or the other approach at runtime?
[1]:
http://www.browserscope.org/?category=network