On Wed, 2004-06-16 at 11:40 -0400, Creative Chemistry wrote:
I know There has been a small problem with performance on large wikis and templates that are used in hundreds of articles, or articles that use many templates.
Am I correct in suspecting that (for wikipedia) this will be a non-issue as soon as the next version of squid is stable? I say this because of that feature squid will have to cache only certain parts of the page and keep others dynamic, almost like a template system. Could this feature be exploited to massively accelerate the rendering of pages that use templates?
Translation of template inclusions to esi tags is not yet implemented, and there might be some unknowns on the way. Every dynamic part decreases performance of the squid in any case (i benchmarked up to ten parts up to now), a page consisting of > 20 one-word templates certainly wouldn't perform too well. On the other hand, another squid 3 for esi rendering would very likely bring more performance than the same machine as another apache. I wonder if active purging is really needed for words on wiktionaries- would a few days lag really be a problem? If not, an inline template thing that doesn't translate to esi tags and is updated the next time somebody either forces a refresh or the squid maxage is reached might be good enough. I'd expect something like this to perform better than pages consisting of >10 templates, a benchmark should be a good idea.
Apart from that, i have the feeling that something more specialized/ structured might be needed for wiktionaries. Import of existing databases and export in something like the dict format could make the project more useful.
I know that the problem of updating these templates still exists, but something is something, no?
This would actually get much easier because only one purge would be necessary to update all instances of this template, the pages that include them wouldn't need to be purged.
Many things are prepared for esi integration already, the remaining work might not be all that much if all goes according to plan. It's on my todo list for 1.4, however i'll do a bit less for a while- a small break after all the 1.3 debugging is very welcome ;-)
Gabriel Wicke