[Wikipedia-l] Re: Performance hacks

[Tim Starling]

Schneelocke wrote:
> Hi Brion Vibber,
> 
> 
>>I've temporarily disabled talk page notification for IP addresses that
>>aren't logged in, as this dumps an extra database query for every single
>>hit.
>>
>>If it doesn't make a big difference, it'll get turned back on shortly.
> 
> 
> It does seem to make a noticeable positive difference.
> 

It's unfortunate that we have to, that's a very important feature. It 
would probably be wise to advertise this in Wikipedia:Announcements, 
otherwise the rate at which anonymous users are banned will suddenly jump.

May I suggest also reducing the number of update queries to sitestats? I 
was going to do it myself, but I'm not going to have time for the next 
week and a half. My idea was to use a shared memory location which is 
incremented each time a page is viewed, and then flush it to the 
database once every 100 views. If a type of shared memory can be found 
which survives an apache restart, it would be very accurate. Then we 
just lose 50 views once a month or so. I'm not sure how much performance 
would be gained, but I'm willing to bet it's worth the effort.

-- Tim Starling.