Manual:$wgMiserMode

From mediawiki.org
Performance hacks and limits: $wgMiserMode
Enable/disable database-intensive features
Introduced in version:pre 1.1.0
Removed in version:still in use
Allowed values:(boolean)
Default value:false

Miser mode is a mode intended to reduce load on server farms running a large number of wikis. It is enabled on all WMF wikis.

Details[edit]

If true, disable database-intensive features, so that they can be managed/controlled separately if desired. This includes reading special pages marked as expensive from the cache instead of regenerating them every time they are requested.

With $wgMiserMode set to true, this means that the special pages managed by this flag will only be updated when explicitly made to update. For example, setting up a cron-job to call /maintenance/updateSpecialPages.php or using Extension:RefreshSpecial .

The other disabled features are...

  • Disables custom formatting of change sizes in Special:RecentChanges via MediaWiki:Rc-change-size (r48986)
  • Disables selecting all pages that start with x box on Special:Log (and leprefix option of list=logevents API module)
  • Totally disables Special:MimeSearch, as well as aimime and famime option in the list=allimages and list=filearchive API module
  • Disables showsizediff option of the RSS feed for Special:Contributions
  • In the list=categorymembers and list=externallinks API module, uses reduced sorting by namespace mode (returns only a few results when cmnamespace or elnamespace option is in use).
  • Doesn't update number of active users on Special:Statistics quite as often (?)
  • Disables the search for images with x somewhere in their name box on Special:NewImages and Special:ListFiles
  • Do not show how many previous versions of an image were uploaded on Special:ListFiles
  • When running rebuildrecentchanges.php maintenance script, will not re-auto-patrol edits by users with auto-patrol flag.
  • When running updateCollation.php maintenance script, will not tell you how many rows in total there are to update.
MediaWiki version:
1.23
Gerrit change 109710
MediaWiki versions:
1.33 – 1.34
Gerrit change 294774
  • Disables the {{REVISIONID}} magic word in content namespaces as defined with $wgContentNamespaces as of gerrit:294774. It is substituted by a single dash after saving the page.
MediaWiki version:
1.35
Gerrit change 570985
  • Disables the {{REVISIONID}} magic word in subject namespaces as of gerrit:570985. It is substituted by a single dash after saving the page.

For reference, this very wiki uses miser mode. You can tell if a wiki has miser mode enabled via the meta=siteinfo API module.

update.php[edit]

MediaWiki version:
1.18

This configuration option disables update.php in 1.18.0 (and only 1.18.0. Subsequent releases will not use this option for that purpose), requiring one to use --force to run that script. Very very very large wikis (like Wikipedia) may need to have more careful upgrade process than the maintenance script does, but most sites would not have to worry about this.


See also[edit]