On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 1:57 PM, S Page spage@wikimedia.org wrote:
I'm not sure if there's any reason to interpose gettingstartedgetpages instead of querying search directly for morelike:*pagetitle*, it might cache stuff in Redis. The mobile apps might get better "Read more" suggestions using one of these.
At a glance, Redis is only used for caching category contents (ie. not at all when the morelike option is used). Anyway, if the concern is frontend performance, then requests should be cached in Varnish (otherwise the request has to travel to the data center, spin up a PHP process, load MediaWiki etc. so it's going to be slow even if all the API module does is fetch a value from cache), and that can be done for any API module via (s)maxage [1].
OTOH there is a good reason not to use gettingstartedgetpages, namely that GettingStarted is not installed on most WMF wikis.