Hi everyone,
Just repeating something I just posted to http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/planned-1-17-deployment/
The engineering team is busy working on the deployment of the 1.17 branch of MediaWiki[1]. We plan to roll this out next week to all languages and projects, Tuesday, February 8, with work starting at 07:00 UTC (which is 11pm on Monday, February 7 for San Francisco).
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn’t go well, that’s because there’s something we missed, and that’s where we’d love your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/. If you find issues, please report them in Bugzilla: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla
There are many, many little fixes and improvements that have gone into 1.17 (see the draft release notes[2] for an exhaustive list) . There isn’t much that’s visible to users of the site, but one under the hood improvement that should result in some speed improvements: Resource Loader[3]. Resource Loader optimizes the use of JavaScript in MediaWiki, speeding up delivery of JavaScript by compressing it sometimes, and cutting down on the amount of unused JavaScript that gets delivered to the browser in the first place. Much of the work in this development cycle has been centered on ensuring compatibility with the new system. Since it makes such a large shift in the way that JavaScript is delivered to the browser, it’s also an operational aspect we’ll be keeping a close eye on, as load shifts between servers in our infrastructure.
Note that this isn’t a release for download, yet. On and after February 8, the “latest” version of MediaWiki will still be 1.16 as listed on mediawiki.org. We plan to update this to 1.17 sometime after the deployment of the 1.17 branch, after we’ve had time to run it in production for a while and fix the issues we’re likely to find.
So please, help us test this release, and if you find bugs, please report them in Bugzilla. Thanks!
Rob
[1] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_roadmap/1.17 [2] http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/branches/REL1_17/phase3/RELEASE-NO... [3] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/ResourceLoader [4] http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download
Rob Lanphier wrote:
Just repeating something I just posted to http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/planned-1-17-deployment/
Thank you for posting here. I'm not sure about others, but I rarely visit techblog.wikimedia.org. It's great news. :-)
The engineering team is busy working on the deployment of the 1.17 branch of MediaWiki[1]. We plan to roll this out next week to all languages and projects, Tuesday, February 8, with work starting at 07:00 UTC (which is 11pm on Monday, February 7 for San Francisco).
Can you explain why you're rolling out when it's the middle of the night where Wikimedia is headquartered? I have a few different theories (site traffic, time zones of the operations team, etc.), but a clarification here would be good.
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn¹t go well, that¹s because there¹s something we missed, and that¹s where we¹d love your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/.
Why is prototype.wikimedia.org being used instead of test.wikipedia.org? I was under the impression that the purpose of test.wikipedia.org was a pre-deployment launch pad while prototype.wikimedia.org is used for testing new extensions/features. Has this changed?
Thanks again for the post. I really do appreciate it.
MZMcBride
On Mon, Jan 31, 2011 at 7:41 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Rob Lanphier wrote:
Just repeating something I just posted to http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/planned-1-17-deployment/
Thank you for posting here. I'm not sure about others, but I rarely visit techblog.wikimedia.org. It's great news. :-)
No problem! One thing I forgot to mention (this goes for everyone) Please spread the word! There are no doubt going to be people who are caught off guard by this no matter where we post this, (possibly) short of CentralNotice.
The engineering team is busy working on the deployment of the 1.17 branch
of
MediaWiki[1]. We plan to roll this out next week to all languages and projects, Tuesday, February 8, with work starting at 07:00 UTC (which is 11pm on Monday, February 7 for San Francisco).
Can you explain why you're rolling out when it's the middle of the night where Wikimedia is headquartered? I have a few different theories (site traffic, time zones of the operations team, etc.), but a clarification here would be good.
We lost the game of rock/paper/scissors. :) We decided to do this very late U.S. west coast time so that our European and Australian contingents would be well rested in case there are problems. Given that we have key personnel pretty much all over the globe, there wasn't going to be a great time for this, and this has the added advantage of being a relatively low traffic time for us.
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn¹t
go
well, that¹s because there¹s something we missed, and that¹s where we¹d
love
your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of
the
software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/.
Why is prototype.wikimedia.org being used instead of test.wikipedia.org? I was under the impression that the purpose of test.wikipedia.org was a pre-deployment launch pad while prototype.wikimedia.org is used for testing new extensions/features. Has this changed?
Yeah it has. I don't recall the exact history of how we got to this point. I imagine that the two should become one in the future.
Thanks again for the post. I really do appreciate it.
No problem!
Rob
2011/2/1 Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net:
Can you explain why you're rolling out when it's the middle of the night where Wikimedia is headquartered? I have a few different theories (site traffic, time zones of the operations team, etc.), but a clarification here would be good.
We lost the game of rock/paper/scissors. :) We decided to do this very late U.S. west coast time so that our European and Australian contingents would be well rested in case there are problems. Given that we have key personnel pretty much all over the globe, there wasn't going to be a great time for this, and this has the added advantage of being a relatively low traffic time for us.
Look at http://torrus.wikimedia.org/torrus/CDN?path=%2FTotals%2F and you'll see that, for the past two days, the time of lowest traffic was between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC. This has been a quite reliable pattern for quite some time now (except that it shifts by an hour in Northern Hemisphere summer, due to DST), and we've also used this time for the first few Vector deployments.
It'll be an annoying time for all of us. Europe-based people will have to get up relatively early ("engineer early", in RobLa's words), it'll be 1am and 2am respectively for our US-based operations people (despite WMF being headquartered in SF, we currently have no ops engineers there, although of course other SF people will be involved and they'll also be working in the middle of the night), and Tim will most likely be eating dinner at his desk while possibly keeping the site up.
Why is prototype.wikimedia.org being used instead of test.wikipedia.org? I was under the impression that the purpose of test.wikipedia.org was a pre-deployment launch pad while prototype.wikimedia.org is used for testing new extensions/features. Has this changed?
Yeah it has. I don't recall the exact history of how we got to this point. I imagine that the two should become one in the future.
The fundamental difference between test and prototype is that test is part of the cluster, and prototype is separated from it. It's undesirable and impractical to run experimental code on test for this reason, so it's only used as a quick last check for code that's going to deployed soon (say, within the next hour). Due to the way our deployment infrastructure works right now, it's impractical keeping undeployed code around on test, because it can be hard or even impossible for the next person needing to deploy a small change to the rest of the cluster to avoid deploying the test code cluster-wide.
In the future, we'll have a virtualization cluster for testing experimental code, which will be integrated with the cluster more closely than prototype is (mostly in terms of configuration synchronization, but also because it'll run on our machines rather than on a Linode VM) while maintaining a safe level of separation. Ryan Lane can probably talk about this in more detail. Also, there are plans to adjust our infrastructure to support heterogeneous deployments (different versions of the code on different wikis).
Roan Kattouw (Catrope)
Roan Kattouw (2011-02-01 10:14):
2011/2/1 Rob Lanphierrobla@robla.net:
Can you explain why you're rolling out when it's the middle of the night where Wikimedia is headquartered? I have a few different theories (site traffic, time zones of the operations team, etc.), but a clarification here would be good.
We lost the game of rock/paper/scissors. :) We decided to do this very late U.S. west coast time so that our European and Australian contingents would be well rested in case there are problems. Given that we have key personnel pretty much all over the globe, there wasn't going to be a great time for this, and this has the added advantage of being a relatively low traffic time for us.
Look at http://torrus.wikimedia.org/torrus/CDN?path=%2FTotals%2F and you'll see that, for the past two days, the time of lowest traffic was between 06:00 and 07:00 UTC. This has been a quite reliable pattern for quite some time now (except that it shifts by an hour in Northern Hemisphere summer, due to DST), and we've also used this time for the first few Vector deployments.
[...]
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland. I will not be able to be there when hell will brake loose as I will be working and I'm sure most of the Polish tech admins will be too. Note that we was able test Vector with current scripts before the deploment so this is a bit different. And I still remember the ammount of complaints bouncing here and there when Vector came and broke Wikipedia and what not... Not that they were all valid and could have been avoided, but maybe some could.
Not that I'm complaining ;-), but prototype is... well it's empty for now and it would be good if we could test scripts and do it as fast (and as soon) as possible. I've already asked Leinad, but maybe someone could import current Mediawiki namespace to prototype quicker.
For one thing - I think our script for moving the search bar to the left side panel will be probably broken (as you make it wider now) and this will probably have to be fixed right after deployment...
Regards, Nux.
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Maciej Jaros egil@wp.pl wrote:
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland.
Not easily. As a general rule all software goes to all sites at the same time.
I will not be able to be there when hell will brake loose as I will be working and I'm sure most of the Polish tech admins will be too.
Well luckily none of you need to be there for this ;-) This is a normal software deployment of the latest fixes and features. There's nothing special or different about this one from the dozens that have happened over the years.
-Chad
Chad (2011-02-03 20:52):
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Maciej Jarosegil@wp.pl wrote:
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland.
Not easily. As a general rule all software goes to all sites at the same time.
How hard is not easily? :-)
I will not be able to be there when hell will brake loose as I will be working and I'm sure most of the Polish tech admins will be too.
Well luckily none of you need to be there for this ;-) This is a normal software deployment of the latest fixes and features. There's nothing special or different about this one from the dozens that have happened over the years.
Theoretically you're right ;-). But to my knowledge RL is in this release and this make this release almost as special as making Vector default. And Vector was easier because we were able to test it live with our scripts. But maybe I'm just superstitious ;-).
Cheers, Nux.
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Maciej Jaros egil@wp.pl wrote:
Chad (2011-02-03 20:52):
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 2:48 PM, Maciej Jarosegil@wp.pl wrote:
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland.
Not easily. As a general rule all software goes to all sites at the same time.
How hard is not easily? :-)
Hard enough the ops team would rather not try to rush it together at the last minute, as the infrastructure tweaks needed could break more stuff than the upgrade...
[Fun fact: there *are* some leftover bits in the Wikimedia server infrastructure from our big 1.4->1.5 upgrade in '05 for serving different sites out of different versions, but it hasn't been exercised since. Some of the pieces are gone, others are ignored by other bits running maintenance scripts and such, and some would need to be recreated differently to deal with today's higher-scale traffic. It might happen for the next quarterly release, but not this time around.]
Theoretically you're right ;-). But to my knowledge RL is in this release and this make this release almost as special as making Vector default. And Vector was easier because we were able to test it live with our scripts. But maybe I'm just superstitious ;-).
Think of the first day or two after the upgrade as your chance to collaboratively track down anything you didn't miss! ;)
In theory, folks should be testing their scripts already on the various prototype wikis and any personal test wikis y'all might have set up, but of course that's never going to catch everything.
-- brion
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
... It might happen for the next quarterly release, but not this time around.]
Haha, quarterly releases :p
-Chad
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
... It might happen for the next quarterly release, but not this time around.]
Haha, quarterly releases :p
It's never too late to get back on track. :)
-- brion
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
... It might happen for the next quarterly release, but not this time around.]
Haha, quarterly releases :p
It's never too late to get back on track. :)
Were we ever on track?
-Chad
I think it's accidentally happened that two MediaWiki versions were released less than 4 months apart, but I'd really like to see us get back to releasing three versions a years again instead of barely 2.
Siebrand
Op 04-02-11 00:17 schreef Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Haha, quarterly releases :p
It's never too late to get back on track. :)
Were we ever on track?
-Chad
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:17 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 5:17 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 1:07 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
On Thu, Feb 3, 2011 at 3:19 PM, Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com wrote:
... It might happen for the next quarterly release, but not this time around.]
Haha, quarterly releases :p
It's never too late to get back on track. :)
Were we ever on track?
1.5.0: 2005-10-05 1.6.0: 2006-04-05 (first scheduled quarterly release) 1.7.0: 2006-07-06 - 3 months 1.8.0: 2006-10-10 - 3 months 1.9.0: 2007-01-10 - 3 months 1.10.0: 2007-05-09 - 4 months (a little late) 1.11.0: 2007-09-10 - 4 months (a little late) 1.12.0: 2008-03-20 - ~6 months (missed one quarter) 1.13.0: 2008-08-14 - ~5 months (missed one quarter) 1.14.0: 2009-02-22 - ~6 months (missed one quarter) 1.15.0: 2009-06-10 - 3.5 months 1.16.0: 2010-07-28 - 13.5 months (missed 3 quarters)
So roughly: 2006 & 2007 were pretty well on track, with some slight slides due to extra beta & release candidate testing on 1.10 and 1.11. Things then started to slide a bit with 2008 & early 2009's updates slipping to semiannual, but we got back on quarterly track with summer 2009's 1.15 release.
We then have a big empty spot where it took over a year to get 1.16 pushed through to stable release. I get the impression that a large part of this delay was that there was no clear consensus on the js2 stuff; once that got re-imagined as 1.17's ResourceLoader which got more buy-in, 1.16 was able to get a cleaner release without the next-gen JS code, and 1.17 has been able to concentrate more on that layer of things.
1.17 releasing soon should bring the schedule back to semi-annual, but there's no firm impediment other than our own self-organization to pushing 1.18 out 3 months later instead of 6 or 13.
-- brion
Maciej Jaros wrote:
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland. I will not be able to be there when hell will brake loose as I will be working and I'm sure most of the Polish tech admins will be too. Note that we was able test Vector with current scripts before the deploment so this is a bit different. And I still remember the ammount of complaints bouncing here and there when Vector came and broke Wikipedia and what not... Not that they were all valid and could have been avoided, but maybe some could.
Not that I'm complaining ;-), but prototype is... well it's empty for now and it would be good if we could test scripts and do it as fast (and as soon) as possible. I've already asked Leinad, but maybe someone could import current Mediawiki namespace to prototype quicker.
For one thing - I think our script for moving the search bar to the left side panel will be probably broken (as you make it wider now) and this will probably have to be fixed right after deployment...
Regards, Nux.
You could also test the scripts in advance. If you think a particular script will break/need to be disabled with the switchover, you can always warp it in a if (wgVersion=="1.16wmf4") { check. That kind of action shouldn't be needed, though.
I don't see that plwiki have its search bar at the left sidebar, I don't know what does that script.
Platonides (2011-02-03 21:53):
Maciej Jaros wrote:
Can you set a different deploy date for different projects? E.g. 18.00 UTC for Poland. I will not be able to be there when hell will brake loose as I will be working and I'm sure most of the Polish tech admins will be too. Note that we was able test Vector with current scripts before the deploment so this is a bit different. And I still remember the ammount of complaints bouncing here and there when Vector came and broke Wikipedia and what not... Not that they were all valid and could have been avoided, but maybe some could.
Not that I'm complaining ;-), but prototype is... well it's empty for now and it would be good if we could test scripts and do it as fast (and as soon) as possible. I've already asked Leinad, but maybe someone could import current Mediawiki namespace to prototype quicker.
For one thing - I think our script for moving the search bar to the left side panel will be probably broken (as you make it wider now) and this will probably have to be fixed right after deployment...
Regards, Nux.
You could also test the scripts in advance. If you think a particular script will break/need to be disabled with the switchover, you can always warp it in a if (wgVersion=="1.16wmf4") { check. That kind of action shouldn't be needed, though.
Hm... Not a bad idea.
I don't see that plwiki have its search bar at the left sidebar, I don't know what does that script.
You can switch with a link at the top of the page (in p-personal) on the left. It stays that way thanks to the cookie setting and you don't have to be logged in... Just a little something I've done for those wanting to go back a bit to monobook but not all the way ;-). I can already see it's broken on prototype (we now have MediaWiki imported) but that's an easy fix with that wgVersion hack.
Cheers, Nux.
Rob Lanphier wrote:
MZMcBride wrote:
Rob Lanphier wrote:
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn¹t go well, that¹s because there¹s something we missed, and that¹s where we¹d love your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/ .
Why is prototype.wikimedia.org being used instead of test.wikipedia.org? I was under the impression that the purpose of test.wikipedia.org was a pre-deployment launch pad while prototype.wikimedia.org is used for testing new extensions/features. Has this changed?
Yeah it has. I don't recall the exact history of how we got to this point. I imagine that the two should become one in the future.
Another difference I'd like to point out is that prototype isn't 1 wiki, it's a group of wikis. If I recall correctly there will be a prototype for each of the major wikipedia projects and special projects (eg. commons). With their main page and site scripts copied there. That way users can see if everything works properly, mess with their gadgets, check common.css/.js and <skinName>.js/.css.
-- Krinkle
On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 1:18 AM, Rob Lanphier robla@robla.net wrote:
We lost the game of rock/paper/scissors. :) We decided to do this very late U.S. west coast time so that our European and Australian contingents would be well rested in case there are problems. Given that we have key personnel pretty much all over the globe, there wasn't going to be a great time for this, and this has the added advantage of being a relatively low traffic time for us.
Once again it falls to EST to be up at 2am. I've really got to get better at rock/paper/scissors ;-)
-Chad
----- Original Message ----- From: "Rob Lanphier" robla@wikimedia.org Newsgroups: gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical To: "Wikimedia developers" wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 8:15 AM Subject: Planned 1.17 deployment on February 8
If all goes well, you should only notice the improvement. If it doesn’t go well, that’s because there’s something we missed, and that’s where we’d love your help. Please help us test this release! We have a test instance of the software we plan to deploy available at http://prototype.wikimedia.org/. If you find issues, please report them in Bugzilla: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Bugzilla
Hi Rob I will take look on this work and report bugs to Bugzilla.
Thanks Janesh
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org