Wikimedia Platform Engineering/Site performance and architecture

The Site performance and architecture team (originally Incremental architectural improvements) was a subteam of Wikimedia Platform Engineering from June 2012 to 2015. Its responsibilities are now covered by the Performance Team and MediaWiki Platform Team.

Team

 * Tim Starling (Lead)
 * Ori Livneh
 * Aaron Schulz
 * Antoine Musso
 * Andrew Garrett

Mission
" Various initiatives geared toward improving site responsiveness, decreasing resource consumption, and/or improving site maintainability."

Rationale
Performance is important for user engagement.

Many small architectural changes and improvements are being done all of the time without a lot of fanfare. This is a general activity area where we communicate changes made along these lines.

Status
Weekly and monthly status updates at Site performance and architecture/status.

April-June 2013

 * JobQueue improvements
 * Eqiad migration wrapup
 * Migrate fenari to tin.eqiad.wmnet
 * Migration to Ceph - still running sync scripts, possible split-brain issues with memcache
 * Migrate hume to terbium.eqiad.wmnet

October-December 2013

 * New deployment system (replacing scap)
 * Caching improvements
 * - Rewrite jobs-loop.sh in a proper programming language
 * - Redirect to canonical encoding
 * - When a commons image is updated, update the pages that use it
 * - Include version in thumbnail URL
 * - Queue refreshLinks jobs on template deletion
 * - Separate Cache-Control header for proxy and client
 * - Enable importing across all Wikimedia projects
 * - resetUserTokens.php not usable on large wikis

January-December 2014

 * HHVM AKA HipHop
 * Implement Lua extension
 * Develop prodution configuration

2015



 * HTTPS by default and SPDY.
 * Save Timing.