On Thu, Mar 21, 2013 at 6:40 PM, Asher Feldman afeldman@wikimedia.orgwrote:
Right now, varying amounts of effort are made to highlight potential performance bottlenecks in code review, and engineers are encouraged to profile and optimize their own code. But beyond "is the site still up for everyone / are users complaining on the village pump / am I ranting in irc", we've offered no guidelines as to what sort of request latency is reasonable or acceptable. If a new feature (like aftv5, or flow) turns out not to meet perf standards after deployment, that would be a high priority bug and the feature may be disabled depending on the impact, or if not addressed in a reasonable time frame. Obviously standards like this can't be applied to certain existing parts of mediawiki, but systems other than the parser or preprocessor that don't meet new standards should at least be prioritized for improvement.
Thoughts?
As a features product manager, I am totally behind this. I don't take adding another potential blocker lightly, but performance is a feature, and not a minor one. For me the hurdle to taking this more seriously, beyond just "is this thing unusably/annoyingly slow when testing it?", has always been a way to reliably measure performance, set goals, and a set of guidelines.
Like MZ suggests, I think the place to discuss that is in an RFC on mediawiki.org, but in general I want to say that I support creating a reasonable set of guidelines based data.
Steven