On 10/26/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote:
The question is, how true is it that "almost
every
very-high-traffic page on Wikipedia is having extreme problems
right now". I suspect not, but if so, is it because there are
more pages with say, heavy use of the {cite} template, or because
templates like {cite} have gotten more complicated, or because
template interpolation has somehow gotten slower, or simply
because there are more hits and edits being processed every day,
such that our headroom is going down?
Well, whatever the problem is, I suspect I know one way that would fix
it: rewriting the parser in C(++). Unfortunately, that's a whole lot
easier said than done. Rewriting even part of it, though, say
replaceVariables, might be a big benefit.
For now it might be best to refine our heuristics of what's slow to
render. Currently we use a simple text-length heuristic, but perhaps
it would make more sense to incorporate additional criteria. Maximum
number of template inclusions? Maximum template depth? It would
require testing to see what would be effective.