Hi,
please tell me, what is the thought behind the impossibility, that a normal admin can delete pages with more than 5000 revisions.
Thank you Martin aka Doc Taxon ...
5000 is a very common limit that's all over MediaWiki (APIs and such) simply to not crash our servers. Which page is it? Usually pages with any notable history are turned into redirects and not deleted.
Kind regards Thiemo
Thanks for your reply.
No, it's a portal service page with bot stuff only and without notable history at all.
But how can a 5000+ page deletion crash any of your servers? In my opinion happens not much in databases.
All the best, Martin
Thiemo Kreuz thiemo.kreuz@wikimedia.de schrieb am Di., 23. Aug. 2022, 13:35:
5000 is a very common limit that's all over MediaWiki (APIs and such) simply to not crash our servers. Which page is it? Usually pages with any notable history are turned into redirects and not deleted.
Kind regards Thiemo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
There appears to have been an incident in 2008 where Wikipedia was disrupted for half an hour by deleting the enwiki Wikipedia:Sandbox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Sandbox page, which has a lot of revisions. After this, the 5000 revision limit was coded in. More info:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Deletion_process#Pages_with_many_rev... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_stocks#Scientizzle_for_the_B... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_16#...
Hope that helps. Thanks and have a great day.
Novem Linguae
On 8/23/2022 4:42 AM, Martin Domdey wrote:
Thanks for your reply.
No, it's a portal service page with bot stuff only and without notable history at all.
But how can a 5000+ page deletion crash any of your servers? In my opinion happens not much in databases.
All the best, Martin
Thiemo Kreuz thiemo.kreuz@wikimedia.de schrieb am Di., 23. Aug. 2022, 13:35:
5000 is a very common limit that's all over MediaWiki (APIs and such) simply to not crash our servers. Which page is it? Usually pages with any notable history are turned into redirects and not deleted. Kind regards Thiemo _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
Wikitech-l mailing list --wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email towikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
On 23/8/22 21:29, Martin Domdey wrote:
Hi,
please tell me, what is the thought behind the impossibility, that a normal admin can delete pages with more than 5000 revisions.
The introduction of the limit was announced in 2008 at WP:VPT archive 16 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)/Archive_16#Deletion_restrictions_for_pages_with_long_histories. IIRC the main problem was replication lag.
Later, the queries were broken up into batches with a wait for replication. This meant that deleting large articles was merely slow (tens of seconds) and prone to failure, it didn't immediately break the whole site. The bigdelete right was created and was granted to some groups, but often, deleting articles with many revisions required the use of a server-side maintenance script, since a normal request would time out and the database writes would roll back.
In 2018, deleting pages with many revisions became asynchronous, deferred via the job queue (T198176 https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T198176). So it became feasible to delete these pages via the web.
I don't think there has been a discussion since then on the value of $wgDeleteRevisionsLimit or the groups given the bigdelete right.
-- Tim Starling
The limit exists because deleting a page requires copying all of its revisions from the 'revision' table to the 'archive' table. I imagine it was a simple practical solution in 2003.
There's some discussion of the problem and links to other relevant bug reports at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T20493 .
Solving the ticket MatmaRex mentioned (T20493) would remove the 5,000 limitation and address several other major tech debt in our databases. It's on the roadmap of the database work (T297633) and I hope to start it later in this year or early next. It will take a while but we will get there and the problem is on our radar.
HTH
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