On Wed, Mar 11, 2009 at 12:57 PM, mizusumashi mizusumashi@coda.ocn.ne.jp wrote:
I hava a question about caching and sever's overload. My colleague said that local wiki's MediaWiki namescape pages may make less overload of it's server, because these messages chaced and default messages are read from files.
I think, default messages are in PHP code files and these PHP codes may be compiled and cached between apache is alive. In other hand, messages saved in local Wiki are in DB, and they are got from DB server by all page requests.
Messages are almost never retrieved from either the DB or from files. They're normally retrieved from memcached, regardless of where they originate. As far as I know, there should therefore be no difference at all between whether the messages come from files or from BetaWiki.
It's good policy to blank messages that are the same as the default, but only so that your wiki will get any updates or improvements to the defaults automatically. (IIRC, a blank message is treated as nonexistent, and it preserves the history publicly, so this is likely preferable to deletion.)