Austin Hair wrote:
Personally (and this almost always incites a riot when
proposed in a
public forum), I'd like to see MediaWiki rewritten in a language other
than PHP, or at least have the critical parsing functions moved to
something more efficient than calling preg_replace inside recursive
functions (that is to say, anything).
We've already had one that was significantly slower than the regex-based
parser (JeLuF's tokenizer) and one that was about the same speed
(Waikiki). The parser we have now may well be the fastest general design
possible for native PHP. A few people have made the mistake of thinking
anything would be faster, that's clearly not true. It has to be
carefullly designed and optimised regardless of what language you write
it in.
One important thing to note is that the parser is a performance problem,
not a scalability problem. We really can throw more hardware at it, and
that will fix it quite nicely. In my opinion, our biggest performance
problem at the moment is not the parser, it's replication lag and
database load balancing. There's lots of work that has to be done there.
-- Tim Starling