Hiya MZ,
<quote name="MZMcBride" date="2013-04-15" time="22:02:03 -0400">
I looked at your original e-mail and this e-mail, but I'm still not sure what Redis is or how it relates to the MediaWiki job queue. I looked for more information at
[snip lots of places]
Are there docs somewhere for those interested? (Apologies if docs have been posted to this mailing list and I've simply missed them.)
Not really, no (at least, not that I know of). This is a part of the general site performance improvement work, tracked under this project in our monthly reports: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Site_performance_and_architecture
You can see the update for March was: "JobQueueRedis merged, JobQueueAggregatorRedis merged and deployed. These improvements to the jobqueue should help site performance (see Tech Operations section of the monthly report)."
The one for April will be something like "Migrated all jobs to the Redis-based JobQueue for the win."
The reason I sent out these two messages is because while general performance improvements aren't always big events, this one was a blocker for some further work on a couple projects; notably WikiData and Echo/Notifications (from the Editor Engagement team). Those two make use of the JobQueue extensively and there were a couple times that the JobQueue feel over in the past couple weeks pre-Redis. Now that we're on Redis things should be much much much more stable (and they seem to be so far).
I don't know the plan for documenting the switch over on mediawiki.org/wikitech; Aaron will have a better idea on that.
Hope that helps,
Greg