On 9/16/07, Andreas Rindler mediawiki@jenandi.com wrote:
I had to restore to the version before the upgrade because the speed was unacceptable. I performed the upgrade again and had the same result.
Try turning on profiling and seeing if you can spot a difference in what functions are taking up time.
It must be something with the database.
No, it could easily be the PHP code, and in fact it probably is. Perhaps there's some PHP module you don't have and we implemented (slow!) emulation of its functions, say, then started using them all over the place. That would explain why the difference wouldn't show up on Wikipedia, which would have the relevant PHP module installed.
Maybe it has to do with the 'Deleting old default messages' processing taking so long? What are these messages anyway?
It has nothing to do with that. The messages make up most of the interface: you can see a complete list of messages at Special:Allmessages. Formerly, all messages were stored in the database by default, so that they could be customized by editing pages in the MediaWiki: namespace. More recently, it was realized that if a message is unmodified, it's faster to not put it in the database to begin with, and to just draw it directly from the PHP files. Thus we now only store modified messages in the database.
For upgrading sites to benefit from this speed improvement, the update script checks each message in the database against the default message (or something to that effect), and if they're the same, it deletes them. Since there are a fairly large number of messages and the check is slow, it can take a very long time. Thus, we added the hint to the update script: "(this can take a long time!)". 45 minutes is not especially out of the ordinary, from my recollection of user reports, although a fast server should be able to do it quite a lot more quickly.
If you skipped that step of the update script, things would be slower if anything. You're welcome to try, and nothing will break, but it's not going to be what's causing your problems.