On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 6:51 PM, Tim Starling <tstarling(a)wikimedia.org>wrote;wrote:
[snip]
When I optimise the parse time of particular pages, I
don't even use
my sysadmin access. The best way to do it is to download the page with
all its templates using Special:Export, and then to load it into a
local wiki. Parsing large pages is typically CPU-dominated, so you can
get a very good approximation without simulating the whole network.
Once the page is in your local wiki, you can use whatever profiling
tools you like: the MW profiler with extra sections, xdebug, gprof,
etc. And you can modify the test cases very easily.
Well, that's the entire point of WP:PERF, at least before it was elevated to
acronym apotheosis. One might reword it as "optimize through science, not
superstition".
You're exactly the sort of person who can and should worry about
performance: you have well-developed debugging skills and significant
knowledge of the system internals. By following well-understood logical
processes you can very effectively identify performance bottlenecks and find
either workarounds (do your template like THIS and it's faster) or fixes (if
we make THIS change to the parser or database lookup code, it goes faster).
I'm going to go out on a limb though and say that most people don't
themselves have the tools or skills to do that. It's not rocket science, but
these are not standard-issue skills. (Maybe they should be, but that's a
story for the educational system!)
The next step from thinking there's a problem is to investigate it
knowledgeably, which means either *having* those skills already,
*developing* them, or *finding* someone else who does.
-- brion