On Friday, April 15, 2016, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Max Semenik wrote:
Right now, MediaWiki has 2 pure-PHP engines to produce diffs (there's also a native PHP extension wikidiff2, but we're not discussing it right now):
- DairikiDiff is what everybody uses, and
- Wikidiff3, and alternative implementation by Guy Van den Broeck that was
around for 8 years but required a configuration change While less battle-tested, Wikidiff3 offers vastly improved performance on heavy diffs compared to DairikiDiff. The price, however, is that it makes certain shortcuts if the diff is too complex. I ran through 100K diffs from English Wikipedia, and 6% of diffs were different. Lots of changes were seemingly insignificant but I need your help with determining if it's really so.
Is there a related Phabricator Maniphest task about this? I'm not sure I understand the motivation for making a switch. I would think that heavy diffs are a very small portion of traffic.
MZMcBride
I think optimizing the worst case performance makes sense, especially if we dont really lose anything in doing so.
To clarify, this is just for third parties, right? Wmf uses wikidiff2.
-- -bawolff