Daniel Barrett wrote:
It seems that one slow extension can bring MediaWiki to a halt. For example, if you define a <wait> tag that simply sleeps for 20 seconds, and you hit a page that contains it, no other MediaWiki pages can be served during those 20 seconds.
Brion Vibber writes:
I did a quick test with this on my local wiki; it looks like it may be session-related.
If I preview a page with <wait>20</wait>, then go load something up in another tab in the same browser, it sits there waiting on both tabs. (Confirmed with Firefox 3 and Safari 3 on Mac OS X.)
If on the other hand I go load things up in another browser, there's no delay there.
Interesting. I tried this on our site, and using multiple browsers/sessions made no difference. Using Firefox 2 from host1 (hitting the <wait> page) and lynx from host2 (hitting any other page), both browsers waited the full 20 seconds.
And indeed, it appears that PHP session files are by default locked to prevent multiple simultaneous accesses.
Is this a PHP issue or a MediaWiki issue, and is there a workaround?
Should this be filed as a "priority 1" bug? Many of our users are getting timeouts due to this problem, ever since we upgraded to 1.13 from 1.12.
Thanks, DanB