Submissions/Delivering MediaWiki faster, smoother and better
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This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2012. |
- Submission no.
659
- Title of the submission
Delivering MediaWiki faster, smoother and better
- Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation)
Presentation
- Author of the submission
Rob Lanphier
- E-mail address
robla@wikimedia.org
- Username
- Country of origin
USA
- Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)
Wikimedia Foundation
- Personal homepage or blog
- Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
Not all of Wikimedia's engineering budget is focused on new features or changes in user interface. A significant part of our engineering capacity (the Platform Engineering group) is dedicated to ensuring the security, stability, maintainability and performance of MediaWiki and related components. Over the course of the past year, Wikimedia Foundation has made significant strides to ensure that new software deployments are less disruptive, more frequent, and result in better performance.
During the past twelve months, we embarked on a number of important initiatives:
- We created and began using a new deployment system (heterogeneous deployment), which enabled faster deployments
- We launched at least two (as of this writing) versions of MediaWiki, and implemented a policy to ensure 20% of all Wikimedia Engineering is dedicated to taks such as code review and bug fixing, in part so that releases can continue to happen more quickly.
- We changed version control systems (from Subversion to Git), to provide more modern tools for developers, and to make it practical to move to a different code review policy that in turn, makes it possible to deploy MediaWiki far more frequently.
- We rebuilt our file storage infrastructure, moving away from NFS to Swift, which will make it far easier to increase our media storage.
- We improved our caching layer, making many types of page views happen much more quickly.
- We had planned on moving to a new PHP architecture (HipHop), but scuttled that in favor of a different performance-oriented project: the introduction of Lua as a template alternative, a project that is just getting underway as of this writing.
During this presentation, I'll take you through the set of things we hoped to accomplish, what we actually accomplished, and what we hope to accomplish in the coming year (still in the planning stages as of this writing), but include a significant amount of performance work, as well as a more pronounced focus on quality assurance. I'll leave plenty of time to answer questions about any and all of these things.
- Track
- Technology and Infrastructure
- Length of presentation/talk
- 25 Minutes
- Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
- Yes
- Slides or further information (optional)
- http://robla.net/2012/platformeng.svg (better to watch it in Chrome/Chromium than Firefox)
- Special request as to time of presentations
Interested attendees
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