On Thu, Mar 12, 2009 at 7:49 AM, Mark Clements (HappyDog) gmane@kennel17.co.uk wrote:
Is there a noticeable performance difference between the two methods if memcached is not available? Obviously this is not applicable to WMF wikis, but I imagine the majority of wikis run without any external caching (beyond whatever is present in MW itself).
In this case, going to the database is drastically slower. On the other hand, you have to go to the database anyway, because you don't know if the message exists in the database without querying it. So there's probably no big difference in this case either. Users without a cache should consider disabling $wgUseDatabaseMessages entirely, or use some other caching method like $wgLocalMessageCache (don't know if that actually works). They should see a large speedup from this.