[Wikipedia-l] Location of PHP software, contributions

[Jimmy Wales]

I think the latest version is on sourceforge.  We may soon move the
"canonical test version" to CVS here.  I'm a little shaky on the
details of how to do that, but Jason can help me, and presumably other
people, too.

> there a newer version? Also, if one (hypothetically) would fix a
> bug, should one just submit it to CVS or send it directly to
> Magnus/Jimbo?

For now, the best thing is to send patches to Magnus.  He sends me patches
every couple of days, and I install them when I can.

> On another note: somebody wrote a suggestion on the website that the
> slow response might be caused by one of the special features that have
> been added. Maybe that could be tested, by running the site for a
> while without watchlists, orphans, most wanted, page counters etc.
> When we had response problems with the old perl script, I remember it
> was due to too many RecentChanges accesses.

Today, if I get time, or else tomorrow, I'm going to install the
latest versions of PHP, Apache, and probably upgrade the kernel on the
machine, too.  Also, I bought memory, and I'll be boosting the memory
in the machine today for sure.

I'm also looking into 'apc', which is a php caching thingy, which (it
is alleged by the creators) gives a 50%-400% performance boost in
real-world applications.  We'll see about that.

I'm also thinking that we might want to think about caching the html
output, rather than generating every page on the fly from the database
all the time.  Basically, when a page is simply read, it can be stored
and also shown to the next person who reads it.  Only when a file is
edited does it need to be regenerated from scratch.

--Jimbo