Reduced loading times for Wikidata/Wikimedia Commons - Wikidata

11 Feb 2020

Hello all,

While cleaning (reviewing and rewriting) the code of Wikidata and Wikimedia
Commons backend in October 2019, The Wikidata team at WMDE together with
WMF worked on reducing the loading time of pages. We managed to reduce the
loading time of every Wikidata page by about 0.1-0.2 seconds. This is due
to a reduction of the modules (sets of code responsible for a certain
function) that need to be loaded every time a page is opened by someone.
Instead of 260 modules, which needed to be loaded before, only 85 modules
need to be loaded now when the page is called. By doing so, it is easier to
load Wikidata pages for people who only have a slow internet connection.

Link to picture on Commons:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Reduced_loading_times_cut.png

Description: Size decrease of the initialization loader on Wikidata pages (see
on Grafana
<https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/BvWJlaDWk/startup-manifest-size?orgId=1&from=now-6M&to=now&var-wiki=enwiki&var-component=All&var-multiwiki=wikidatawiki&fullscreen&panelId=59>
)

Reducing the amount of modules called when loading the page equals a
reduction of about 130 GB of network traffic for all users every day, or
47TB per year. The reduction of network traffic translates into a reduction
of electricity use, thus, this change is also good for the environment.
Additionally, the interdependencies between the modules were reduced from
4MB to 1MB, which improved the loading time per page as well.

Many thanks to everyone involved in this improvement! If you want to get
more details about the actions we performed, you can have a look at the
Phabricator board
<https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/project/board/4268/query/all/>.
If you are developing scripts or tools on top of the Wikidata UI, some
documentation will walk you through the architecture of RessourceLoader
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Architecture>, what’s page
load performance
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Performance_Team/Page_load_performance>
and how to create module bundles with ResourceLoader
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader/Developing_with_ResourceLoader>.

For further questions or feedback, feel free to contact us on this page
<https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Contact_the_development_team>.

Cheers,

Max for the Wikidata team

-- 
Max Klemm
Working Student Community Communication for Technical Wishes

Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin
Phone: +49 (0)30 219 158 26-0https://wikimedia.de

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