Talk:Wikimedia Performance Team/Archive 1

Naming and scope
I am proposing adjusting the name and scope of the team.

Proposal

 * Extend the charter of the Performance team to Performance and Availability, with a focus on site scalability, availability and performance of Wikimedia sites.

What this expanded team will do

 * Identify and correct significant risks to the availability and performance of the Wikimedia sites, either by itself or in co-operation with other teams.

What this team will not do

 * Initiate product-related improvements to the MediaWiki platform
 * Support third-party use of MediaWiki (with technical support, improved packaging, etc.)

Core metrics

 * Site performance, particularly time to first paint and time to save an edit
 * Uptime

Rationale
The Performance team is already a de facto Performance and Availability team. Recent projects have included:
 * fixing the backlogged job queue;
 * diagnosing HHVM-related memory leaks;
 * contributing etcd support to PyBal, the load balancer;
 * automating legacy code deprecation in MediaWiki;
 * writing Puppet modules for Apache, Redis, and HHVM
 * instrumenting MediaWiki internals and creating dashboards for key metrics

Ongoing projects include: - revamping and modernizing the image rendering stack; and - readying MediaWiki’s codebase for multi-datacenter deployment.

The existing Performance team contributes non-performance related features that enhance the availability and scalability of Wikimedia sites. Implementing this proposal would formalize a slightly expanded scope and raise the visibility of the team inside and outside of the Wikimedia Foundation. It will demonstrate the Foundation's dedication and focus to a core task: keeping Wikipedia and her sister sites up and running to the community.

Financial impact
Implementing this proposal would formalize the scope of an existing team without any headcount additions.

I invite comments and feedback about this proposal. --Ori Livneh (talk) 01:11, 9 March 2016 (UTC)