Talk:Main causes of lag

"Google also has lots of funding and thousands of servers."

What does this mean for us? Will they give us funding? Or were you just stating that they have lots of money? { MB | マイカル } 19:48, 29 Aug 2003 (UTC)

It means that Google can handle their much more massive load because they are well-funded and well-equipped, unlike us. --Brion VIBBER

That's true, but even on an unloaded machine, Mediawiki takes forever to generate a page. Like half a second on a server that's lightly loaded. Squid's a beautiful thing, but really, that should be 50 millsecs, not 500. I don't believe this is a programming (construction) issue, as much as an algorithmic issue: like most wikis, Mediawiki is doing a LOT of work on display. That makes page creation simpler, and less costly, but in almost all cases pages are displayed a lot more than they're changed.

I have no idea how much effort it would be to change the system so it'd do more of the display work on the front-end. For links to pages that do not yet exist, either that'd have to be the exception or there'd need to be a table to track "page X links to page Y" so when page Y is created, it could fire off updates to all page Xs in the system. Yes, that'd take time, but compared to the display... how much?

For Wikipedia, maybe the lag is coming from somewhere else. Maybe it's page creation that is taking all the time. For that specific case, profiling of the whole system is needed. (And by now, that's probably been done, hasn't it?) But for general purpose wiki usage, where putting up the Squid cache is really not a very workable option unless you run your own server, that All The Effort On Display concept has got to go. PDK - August 8, 2005

On my unloaded test machine, a page view takes about 50 milliseconds (for a parser-cached page or a fairly short wiki page rendering, plus initialization and skin rendering).

Remember to use a PHP opcode cache (eg Turck MMCache or eAccelerator). This makes a huge difference. --brion 06:50, 8 August 2005 (UTC)