Good evening,
I am currently starting with my diploma thesis at the Semantic Mediawiki
group at University Karlsruhe. I will investigate caching issues in this
context and therefore I started with looking at Mediawiki / Wikipedia
caching and database updates.
>From what I got from the documentation there are three types of caches:
1) Squid HTTP caches (invalidated via Multicast HTCP purging). These
caches rewrite HTTP-header for client caching if necessary.
If I got that right, the caching time depends on $wgSquidMaxage, and the
client cache is invalidated once the user logs in or the page is edited.
Now is the Wikipedia setting for $wgSquidMaxage equal to the default
value given in the documentation (18000)? And is this caching strategy
enforced only in sendCacheControl() or are there other functions I have
to look at?
2) The parser cache which temporarily keeps already parsed pages - this
cache is either in memory or in a special table(?).
3) Some memory cache named memcached that is able to cache database
queries and distribute writes across the database architecture.
This is similar to MySQL query caching?
Another issue are database updates (these occur only, if I edit and
change a page, right? (assuming parser cache is enabled)) - what
influence does caching have on these?
I have to admit that I have not dived deep enough into the code to
understand where and how these updates happen.
I know that is a bunch of question, yet I appreciate any help, be it
answers or links to documentation I have not looked at, yet, very much.
Thanks in advance,
Sebastian
Hi all,
A half-serious feature request. Would it be possible to extend
Wikimedia to allow templates that have effects in other namespaces?
The most obvious application would be for adding text to another
user's talk page without actually having to edit it. It would
certainly make talk discussions easier than the current situation...
Alfred writes on Bertie's talk page:
Hello, your latest addition sucks
Bertie replies on her talk page:
{{usertalk|Alfred|No it doesn't. You're mean.}}
This template makes the text appear on the talk page, but also somehow
makes an elegant link to the discussion appear on Alfred's talk page.
There may be other ways of solving this particularly awkward
situation, in which either you have to monitor other users' talk
pages, copy the entire conversation back and forth, or create two
separate conversation halves at different locations.
Steve
Another power failure at the colo today. I'm not too sure of details yet as this
happened in the middle of the night for me.
Admin log:
https://wikitech.leuksman.com/view/Server_admin_log#April_19
PowerMedium is very very very very very very sorry and blames the equipment
manufacturer; the defective equipment is apparently being replaced.
Note that the server that carries the data dump files is currently offline. If
we don't have it back real soon now I'll restart them on another server.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
An automated run of parserTests.php showed the following failures:
Running test Table security: embedded pipes (http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2006-April/034637.html)... FAILED!
Running test Magic Word: {{NUMBEROFFILES}}... FAILED!
Running test BUG 1887, part 2: A <math> with a thumbnail- math enabled... FAILED!
Passed 300 of 303 tests (99.01%) FAILED!
Hi,
Just wondering what the story with the search functionality is
exactly. My biggest concern is that searches for the exact title of an
existing (but "recently" created articles) fail.
For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Search?search=Cities+%28album%29&fullt…
I understand that searching is a difficult problem best left to
Google, but is there a way where it could at least be hacked to check
for articles whose name matches the search string verbatim?
Thanks,
Steve
Hello,
I implemented a fulltext search in wiki by using the Lucene classes to index
and search the wiki SQL Tables. At the moment I simply use the following
query to select the articles I want to search in:
"SELECT * FROM cur WHERE cur_namespace=0"
To prevent finding already deleted articles I compare the results with the
results I get using the following query:
"SELECT * FROM archive WHERE ar_title='searchterm'"
where "searchterm" is replaced once by every result I get with the first
query. I use a Java-Application to throw out all results that appear in both
tables.
But for some reason a few articles are not contained in the cur table, but
they are appearing as articles in wiki. These articles can be found in a
third table called "searchindex". I cannot use this table for searching
because its not possible to filter it by namespaces like it is in the cur
table.
To get to the point: My problem is, that I cannot figure out a query that
selects not only all articles with a zero namespace in the cur table, but
also those which are only appearing in the searchindex table. I already
tried the query recommended by the mediawiki database documentation of the
searchindex table, but it cant find these few articles with this query
either.
Greetings
Marcel
Hi everyone.
Firstly, I hope I don't sound a complete crank and I'm sorry for the
length of this email.
I'd like to add automatic time zone selection to Mediawiki. On the
English Wikipedia, I think it is entirely appropriate that signatures
include the time in UTC all year round. However, I help to run a wiki
called ganfyd, which is based in the UK and I want the signatures on
that to be in local time i.e. GMT in the winter, and BST in the summer,
changing automatically as required. I have done this as a one time fix
for ganfyd, but would like to offer a general solution to the Mediawiki
community. Before I do it though, I just want to make sure what I'm
offering is wanted, and also that I'm going about it in a sensible way.
What I envisage implementing is the following:
Defining two different time zones: An installation time zone and user
time zones. The installation time zone could be different to the server
time zone, which I expect would be necessary for Wikimedia wikis which
are run on the same server but want different time zones. The
installation time zone would be used for all signature times, and could
be decided either by editing a page in the Mediawiki namespace or
changing a setting LocalSettings.php, I haven't decided yet. Advice anyone?
Having both server time zones and user time zones specified by one of:
1) a description such as UTC
2) an offset from UTC of the form +00:00 (for compatibility with
existing user preferences)
3) a DST aware geographical description such as "Europe/London"
(and all the others here: http://uk2.php.net/manual/en/timezones.php)
The English Wikipedia installation time would be set to UTC.
Ganfyd would be set to Europe/London.
Some European Wikipedias might be set to Europe/Paris, or Brussels or
somewhere like that.
If the server time is set to Europe/London for example, and all that was
shown in signatures, they would become horribly bloated. I would have
them display UTC or BST depending on what time of year the page was saved.
Ideally, a server knows what UTC is, but if it doesn't have it right,
I'd allow for a correction in LocalSettings.php, so the rest of the
features will work as planned.
I plan to do all this without using the new functions that came along in
PHP 5.1.0, since ganfyd runs on PHP 4.4.2, and I can't change that.
Can anyone foresee any problems with this approach?
Best wishes,
Rupert