K Forstner wrote:
Did the announcement that the page would be disabled escape my notice? What is going to be disabled next? Wikipedia?
What the hell! My Watchlist has been the main thing between me and wiki-insanity ever since it became impractical (and later /impossible/) to review an entire day's edits. As far as I'm concerned disabling editing altogether would almost be a better option if it weren't for the "Related Changes" feature (at least I can tract changes to pages I have listed on my user page).
Hey waitaminute - why not place the watchpage list on a regular wiki page so that Related Changes can do it's magic on it? As a matter of fact why can't that /replace/ the slow watchlist code completely? IIRC, the "Related Changes" and "Recent Changes" code is the same.
-- A very annoyed (but understanding) mav (with 2,000 watched pages - I thought I had way more than that...)
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
Hey waitaminute - why not place the watchpage list on a regular wiki page so that Related Changes can do it's magic on it? As a matter of fact why can't that /replace/ the slow watchlist code completely? IIRC, the "Related Changes" and "Recent Changes" code is the same.
Actually, Related Changes is more like Watchlist than it is like Recent Changes, and when you dump a couple thousand links to Related Changes, it's pretty slow too.
Both Related Changes and the Watchlist have the same problem: they have a long list of pages sorted by ID or title, but need to report them sorted by timestamp. This requires fetching a couple thousand rows and sorting every single one before returning the last N edits.
As an example, it takes 10 seconds or so to return Related Changes on a copy of my watchlist:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/User:Brion_VIBBER/...
and a similar amount of time via Special:Watchlist. (Exact time may vary up and down depending on what's buffered and how much work the server is doing, of course. But they seem to be of the same order.)
It's also harder to do mass updates of text pages; watchlist entries need to be able to automatically follow things like page renames, which is very easy to do with watchlist associations in their own table.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
Actually, Related Changes is more like Watchlist than it is like Recent Changes, and when you dump a couple thousand links to Related Changes, it's pretty slow too.
Both Related Changes and the Watchlist have the same problem: they have a long list of pages sorted by ID or title, but need to report them sorted by timestamp. This requires fetching a couple thousand rows and sorting every single one before returning the last N edits.
As an example, it takes 10 seconds or so to return Related Changes on a copy of my watchlist:
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Recentchangeslinked/User:Brion_VIBBER/...
I might be stating the obvious here...
but each time I look at my watchlist, only a dozen or so pages have moved to the top. So you could discard everything that is older than the last view, or maybe the last day / week (user option?)
Or would this method be better:
1. grab stored version watchlist (already ordered) 2. get date of last view of watchlist 3. examine the RC list from that date on 4. pick out items from that list that exist on the watchlist
tarquin wrote:
I might be stating the obvious here...
but each time I look at my watchlist, only a dozen or so pages have moved to the top. So you could discard everything that is older than the last view, or maybe the last day / week (user option?)
To do that with the current table structure you have to either: a) check every single watched page to see if it's recent enough to look at (this is exactly the previous behavior!), or b) start from the most recently edited page and move down through every page checking for watched pages until we've met our display quota or reached the cutoff time.
a) is cheap with small watchlists, but very expensive with some power users where we may be checking a couple thousand pages.
b) is cheap if the number of edits since the cutoff time is small, but very expensive if any real length of time is to be checked... 2796 pages were edited in the last 24 hours, all of which would have to be checked if we want to check for the last day's updates to our watchlist in this way -- even if the watchlist only has ten items!
I've patched it up for now so that it checks how many pages are in your watchlist, and how many pages total have been edited since the cutoff time, and tries to pick the more efficient method.
I've set the default cutoff to one hour; this will generally cover between 100 and 300 edits, which is a lot faster than, say, all 1452 entries in my watchlist. :) If you pick a cutoff that covers more edits than are in your watchlist (plus or minus some fudge factors), it'll switch back to the traditional method and just look through your list. Searching 1452 entries may suck, but that's better than trawling all 16000 or so you'll find edited in a whole week. ;)
Or would this method be better:
- grab stored version watchlist (already ordered)
- get date of last view of watchlist
- examine the RC list from that date on
- pick out items from that list that exist on the watchlist
I'm not sure how cleanly that could be done, hmm...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Daniel Mayer wrote:
K Forstner wrote:
Did the announcement that the page would be disabled escape my notice? What is going to be disabled next? Wikipedia?
What the hell! My Watchlist has been the main thing between me and wiki-insanity ever since it became impractical (and later /impossible/) to review an entire day's edits.
Wiki tech recently saw a discussion between me & someone else about a "next 250 changes" link at the foot of RC.
That would let addicts like Mav and me check a whole day in small increments.
Any word on that?
--- tarquin tarquin@planetunreal.com wrote:
Wiki tech recently saw a discussion between me & someone else about a "next 250 changes" link at the foot of RC.
Excellent idea.
===== Christopher Mahan chris_mahan@yahoo.com 818.943.1850 cell http://www.christophermahan.com/
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