Randall Farmer, 20/01/2014 23:39:
Hi, everyone.
tl;dr: New tool compresses full-history XML at 100MB/s, not 4MB/s, with the same avg compression ratio as 7zip. [...]
Wow! Thanks for continuing work on this.
Technical datadaump aside: *How could I get this more thoroughly tested, then maybe added to the dump process, perhaps with an eye to eventually replacing for 7zip as the alternate, non-bzip2 compressor?
It depends what sort of tests you have in mind. 1) Real life tests with the whole stack of all wikis' dumps to have a complete representation of the effects: it seems you have enough computational power on your own, but on a Labs instance you could read from NFS a copy of the dumps to convert. 2) Testing if/how the binaries work on the cluster machines: you should be able to take the puppet config of the snapshot hosts and just run your tests with the same config. (Again, this is what Labs is for.) 3) Testing the whole dumps process with the new system: I don't think there is a duplicate infrastructure to test stuff on, so this is unlikely. You'd have to contribute puppet changes and get them deployed by Ariel, presumably first adding the new format without replacing any and just with some wikis/workers.
- Who do I
talk to to get started? (I'd dealt with Ariel Glenn before, but haven't seen activity from Ariel lately, and in any case maybe playing with a new tool falls under Labs or some other heading than dumps devops.)
Ops other than Ariel would probably also involved in some way. In particular, the utility should AFAIK become a debian package, whether available in the official repos or just in WMF's. I don't understand if this is the relevant doc: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Git-buildpackage
Am I nuts to be even asking about this? Are there things that would definitely need to change for integration to be possible? Basically, I'm trying to get this from a tech demo to something with real-world utility.
Well, to be useful this would need to replace one of the existing passages, but common formats like bz2 and 7z are unlikely to be abandoned (on the other hand people got used to the chunked dumps). In an ideal world you'd be able to achieve the same results without requiring your program on decompression, "just" by smartly rearranging the input fed to 7z/bzip2. Most of the repetition is about identical or almost identical revisions and I've no idea in what order they appear in the XML; bzip2 is careful but myopic.
Nemo