ResourceLoader/Architecture

This page documents the architecture and features of ResourceLoader. ResourceLoader is the delivery system in MediaWiki for JavaScript, CSS, interface icons, and localisation strings.

Check Presentations for videos and slides about these features.

Principles
ResourceLoader principles, in order of their relative importance:


 * 1) Users.
 * 2) Developers.
 * 3) Servers.

User experience
First and foremost is the end-user's experience. The user experience here is defined as the perceived performance of the overall system. This includes key metrics for the loading of content and interactive features.

Developer experience
Once a goal has been set for the user experience, the developer experience comes right after that. This means we strive for the best possible developer experience, so long it doesn't compromise the user experience or makes it less likely for that experience to be realised.

The public interface presented to developers should:


 * not expose its internals,
 * be easy to understand and comprehend,
 * provide good defaults,
 * make it it easy to do the right thing for users,
 * make other things possible.

Backend performance
ResourceLoader is designed to be light weight and highly scalable. All output is cacheable agnostic of individual users, allowing it to scale to a large deployment (such as Wikipedia) without requiring many backend servers.

In July of 2011, Wikipedia's cluster of edge caches and Apaches comprised of about 400 servers. The edge servers served 90,000 requests per second at peak. Of those, 40,000 were for ResourceLoader (e.g. JS and CSS resources). These 40,000 requests were served by 9 Varnish frontend servers and 4 backend Apaches. The cache hit ratio was 99.82%, resulting in only 73 req/s cache misses toward the backends.

Remember that backend latency (response times) are part of the user experience, not backend performance. A better latency directly affects the end-user experience. If that means the server can handle more load as a result, that's great. But, if it means using the same resources in a shorter amount of time and requiring an extra server (e.g. more RAM or CPU concurrency), that's also fine as the user experience takes precedence.

Modules
ResourceLoader works with a concept of modules. A module is a bundle of resources identified by a symbolic name. They can contain any of the following types of resources:
 * Scripts
 * Styles
 * Messages

Aside from that a module may have several properties:
 * Dependencies
 * Group

All in all, this makes it possible to enqueue or load a module bundle by just using its name (instead of listing out all the resources and/or dependencies etc.).

Modules are delivered to the client in a single request, as a bundle with all their containing resources. More about this follows in the resource sections below. The package is unboxed by the Client.

Wrapping
When one or more module packages are sent to the client, the script components are wrapped in a closure. They are not immediately executed when the browser parses the script response. Instead, the closure is passed to the ResourceLoader client. This allows it to control the order in which the closures execute independently from the order in which they arrive from the server, with regards to the dependency tree (which the client has in memory). See the Client section for more information about the loading procedure and a walkthrough of a example scenarios.

Minification
All scripts are minified before being put in the package. For this we use the JavaScriptMinifier library. In case of a cache-miss, the minification is done on-the-fly on the web server. See also the Caching section for more about the performance of packaging and the caching infrastructure around it.

Conditions
Scripts can be conditionally included in a module based on the environment of the requesting client. This keeps responses relatively small by only including components relevant to the client context.

Example uses of conditions:
 * A language grammar parser that includes different implementations based on the user language.
 * The Vector skin in MediaWiki has a custom jQuery UI theme. When a jQuery UI module is loaded, depending on the environment it loads the default jQuery UI theme or the Vector theme.
 * Moment.js has regional definitions for 62 different languages. Only one of the regional definition files will be included. Language chaining and fallback is handled by MediaWiki's localization framework.

Embedding


In order to reduce the number of HTTP requests for images used in the interface, ResourceLoader makes use of Data URI embedding. When enabled, images will be automatically base64-encoded and embedded into the stylesheet. While it will make the stylesheet larger (due to base64 inflation), it improves performance by removing the overhead associated with requesting all those additional files. The actual server response (which contains the minified result of all concatenated stylesheets and all embedded images in a single request) uses gzip compression. This enables the response to function a bit like a "super sprite" (more on this later). Regardless of the expansion caused by base64 encoding, the gzipped ResourceLoader response is still smaller than the sum of the individual CSS and image binary files.

To enable embedding for an image, use the " " annotation in a CSS comment over the relevant CSS declaration. For example:

Using this technique makes traditional sprites obsolete. While the motivation behind sprites is good (less HTTP requests, better compression) it does come with a few caveats:
 * Maintenance. If an image needs to be updated, one has to regenerate the sprite file, update the background positions in the CSS output, etc.


 * Produces overly complex CSS.

These caveats aren't the end of the world (sprites are in wide use, clearly they do work). Some other resource delivery systems do use sprites, some even perhaps some of the maintenance in an automated fashion. The automated embedding, however, provides the best of both worlds – without any of the caveats.
 * Imposes restrictions on image usage. Properties background-repeat, background-size or background-position may not be used due these leaking other images in the same sprite.

The advantages of sprites still hold up:
 * Reduced number of HTTP requests.
 * Improved compression by combining images in one file.

In addition to that:
 * No maintenance.
 * Clean CSS.
 * No restrictions or sprite "leakage" bugs.
 * Even smaller number of requests. The CSS and the images are now in the same request.
 * No download delay flash. Once the stylesheet is there, all the images are as well. This improves perceived performance. Browsers normally don't download files referenced in CSS until their selectors are active (e.g.. ). This would cause a flash when the user first hovers a button. Embedding makes the image instantly available from the data URI.
 * Better gzip compression. Embedding allows unrelated images and stylesheets to be freely combined and compressed together - a "super sprite", if you will. Also, PNG headers enjoy better compression.

Remapping
ResourceLoader applies path remapping for images not being embedded (e.g. images that exceed the size limit or for browsers that don't support embedding). When the stylesheets are combined during the packaging process, these image urls would break as they would lose the context of a parent directory. Remapping corrects these urls to be relative to the loader location instead.

Flipping

 * See also Directionality support for more information about directionality support in MediaWiki.



With the Flipping functionality it is no longer necessary to manually maintain a copy of the stylesheet for right-to-left languages. ResourceLoader automatically changes direction-sensitive CSS declarations (and more). Internally, the CSSJanus library provides that smart "flipping" logic.

Aside from flipping direction-oriented values, it also converts property names and shorthand values. And it converts references to filenames ending in  into filenames ending in , thereby loading direction-specific iconography,

Consider the following example:

When loaded by ResourceLoader, without any additional changes or configuration, it is automatically turned into the following for users with a right-to-left interface language set:

Sometimes you may want to exclude a rule from being flipped. For that one can use the  annotation. This instructs CSSJanus to skip the next CSS declaration. Or, when used in the selector part, it skips the entire following CSS ruleset.

For example:

Output will be:

Bundling
As mentioned, all resources are combined in a single package. The loader response from the server bundles both scripts and styles from the requested module(s) in the same request. The Client receives this and loads the stylesheet in the DOM at the right time, so they are in memory when the relevant scripts that use these CSS classes, execute.

This means that neither the JS nor the CSS will run if JS is disabled. However, if you need the CSS to still run, you can add one or more CSS-only module with.

Minification
All stylesheets are minified before being put in the package. For this we use the CSSMin library, which was especially developed for ResourceLoader.

Conditions

 * See the Conditions section under Scripts for more information.

Similar to scripts, style bundling also features the ability to compose the module dynamically based on the environment.

Resource: Messages
Messages are exported as a JSON blob, mapping the message keys to the correct translation. They're fetched on the server from MediaWiki's localization framework (including its language fallback logic). Only message keys used by the module are included in the package.

Bundling
Again, all resources are bundled in the same request. The Client then takes the messages and registers them in the localization system on the client side, before the javascript body is executed.

Conditions
As with the other two resource types, the messages component is also optimized to load only what is necessary for the requesting environment. This is especially important considering that MediaWiki is localized in over 300 languages. Only 1 unique set of messages is delivered to the client.

Front-end
So, how does all this play out in the front-end? Let's walkthrough a typical page view in MediaWiki, focusing on the ResourceLoader Client.

Startup Module


The startup module is the first and only hardlinked script being loaded on every page from a  tag. It is a lightweight module that does three things:

It starts by performing a quick sanity check that bails out if the current browser is not supported. This avoids incomplete interfaces and script errors, by preserving the natural non-javascript fallback behavior. For incompatible browsers, the startup module is the first and last script to be loaded. (View source) It exports the module manifest. This contains the dependency information of all modules, cache groups (if any) and the current version hash for each module. A subset of the MediaWiki configuration variables also made available to client-side scripts. It defines the ResourceLoader Client.
 * 1) Sanity check
 * 1) Module manifest
 * 1) Define the loader

Client
The ResourceLoader Client is a tiny JavaScript library is in charge of loading and executing modules from the server. It reads the module manifest and dependency tree as its input. The client is instructed by on-page HTML to load modules for the current page.

Loader
The loader can be given a list of module names to load. It automatically handles dependency resolution using the internal dependency map. It also takes care not to load the same module twice.

All modules needed are then requested in a batches from a server. The loading process is fully asynchronous.

Store
The ResourceLoader client caches the contents of individual modules within the web browser (i.e. HTML5 LocalStorage). This drastically reduces cache fragmentation.

For example, imagine two unrelated modules A and B that both make use of a third module that is exceptionally large. Module A is used on page "Foo", and module B on page "Bar". Without a module store, the following would happen:
 * 1) User views Foo. Client makes network request for.
 * 2) User views Bar. Client makes network request for.
 * 3) User views Foo. Client hits browser cache for.
 * 4) User views Bar. Client hits browser cache for.

On the second page view, we would not cache-hit the Big module because it was part of a different url. In the above scenario, the user would fully download the Big module multiple times, despite it not having changed.

With ResourceLoader's module store, each module gets its own cache entry, which is not affected by other modules in the same batch request. Let's look at the same scenario again:


 * 1) User views Foo. Client makes network request for   . These two are unpacked and kept in the local store as "foo" and "big".
 * 2) User views Bar. Client implements "big" from store. Client makes network request for  , then "bar" is also added to the store.
 * 3) User views Foo. Client implements "foo" and "big" from store. No network request.
 * 4) User views Bar. Client implements "bar" and "big" from store. No network request.

Execution

 * This section is incomplete


 * Execution separated from loading/parsing
 * Direct or delayed execution as appropriate based on module dependencies
 * Insert messages and styles into memory before script execution

Back-end

 * This section is incomplete

Environment
Modules are composed based on the following environmental variables:
 * mode (debug or production)
 * skin
 * user language
 * disable temporarily

The result of the generated module package is cached (see also Caching).

The backend encourages client-side HTTP caching through long cache expiries, and by supporting request validation (responding with  to requests with    headers, when possible).

Response
GET /load.php?modules=foo|bar|quux&lang=en&skin=vector

Disable on a single page
To make it easier to debug a specific page without the influence of site-wide or user-specific gadgets, scripts, or styles; it is possible to temporarily disable them by setting the " " query parameter on any page, e.g. https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Project:Sandbox&safemode=1.

Debug mode

 * This section is incomplete

To make development easier, there is a debug mode in ResourceLoader.

Differences:
 * Script resources: No longer minified, concatenated and loaded from load.php. Instead, load.php will instruct the client to request each source file directly. This makes debugging scripts easier with your browser's developer tools. Transformations such as closure don't apply, so scripts may execute in the global scope.
 * Style resources: No longer minified, concatenated and loaded from load.php. Instead, load.php will instruct the client to request each stylesheet directly. Transformations such as URI embedding and RTL-flipping don't apply.

Toggle mode
The mode can be toggled in several ways. In order of precedence:


 * Query parameter  (string): Set to "true" to enable, to "false" to disable. When absent, falls back to next step. http://example.org/wiki/Main_Page?debug=true
 * Cookie  (string): Set   to enable, delete the cookie to disable (setting to "false" does not work). When absent, falls back to next step.  There is a user script available to simplify toggling this.  Add:   to Special:MyPage/common.js on the wiki where you're debugging.  A link to enable or disable debug mode will be added to the toolbox.  In some browsers, you may need to hard refresh before the change takes effect.
 * (boolean): The default mode is determined by this configuration setting. Unless overridden in LocalSettings, this will be set to . A production wiki should never set this to true as debug mode will then be served to everybody. Thus being inefficient and likely introducing bugs due to the nature of debug mode.

Balance
This section is incomplete


 * Batching.
 * Alphabetical order.
 * Combined version hash (to allow long-term static caching by CDNs, proxies, and web browsers).

Groups
Module groups are used to control cache fragmentation. By default all modules are allowed to be loaded in the same request. The client store prevents most cache fragmentation automatically, but in case fine-tuning is needed, a module group may be used. Use groups sparingly as they naturally require additional HTTP requests.

Any freeform string can be used as a group name. Only modules in the same group are loaded in the same request.

Try to keep group names short as they are sent to the client as part of the module registry. Typically a substring of a module name is used (e.g. "jquery-ui" or "ext.foo").

Beware of reserved names. In addition to the cache fragmentation as described above, these reserved groups are disqualified for client store optimisation and have additional behaviour.
 *  . Reserved for modules that vary by username (e.g. user scripts). These HTTP requests get an additional "user" query parameter. This parameter is available in the ResourceLoaderContext object passed to content methods (e.g. getScript, getStyles). Due to the extra parameter, they don't share cache with other users or logged-out users. The cache will be public. The stylesheets in this module group are loaded after all other modules (last cascading order), using the "ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles" marker as separation.
 * . Reserved for modules that are not allowed to be loaded from the public  endpoint (e.g. for CSRF tokens). Modules in this group are automatically embedded by OutputPage in the HTML when loaded. They cannot be loaded on demand.
 *  . Reserved for stylesheets that are user-generated content, but are not user-specific (rather for the entire site). The stylesheets in this module group are loaded after all other modules (last cascading order), using the "ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles" marker as separation.
 *  . Reserved for stylesheets that are user-generated content, but are not user-specific (rather for the entire site). The stylesheets in this module group are loaded after all other modules (last cascading order), using the "ResourceLoaderDynamicStyles" marker as separation.

On-demand package generation
ResourceLoader features on-demand generation of the module packages. The on-demand generation is very important in MediaWiki because cache invalidation can come from many places. Here's a few examples:
 * Core
 * Extensions Core and extensions generally only change when a wiki is upgraded. But especially on large sites such as Wikipedia, deployments happen many times a day (even updates to core).
 * Users Wiki users granted certain user rights (administrators by default) have the ability to modify the "site" module (which is empty by default and will be loaded for everybody when non-empty). This is all without servers-side access, these scripts/styles are stored as wiki pages in the database. On top of that, each user also has its own module space that is only loaded for that user.
 * Translators The interface messages are shipped with MediaWiki core and are generally considered part of core (and naturally update when upgrading/deploying core). However wikis can customize their interface by using the MediaWiki message namespace to modify interface messages (or create new ones to use in their own modules).

Cache invalidation
Every module has an automatically generated Last-Modified timestamp. This timestamp is based on a number of factors. All together, used to ensure proper cache busting when needed while also avoiding unnecessary re-generation of the package when it isn't needed.
 * JavaScript files and CSS files Last modified timestamps from the files on disk.
 * Files referenced in CSS Extracted from the stylesheets (e.g., see also Remapping). Last modified timestamps from the files on disk.
 * Localization Last time any of the messages has been updated in the localization storage.
 * Dependencies It works recursively for any module that this module depends on.

Because of all these different origins and cache invalidation factors, it is not desirable to have to manually (or scheduled) perform a "build" of some kind that would generate a huge package with everything in it.
 * Not only would it waste resources re-building many modules that haven't changed,
 * it would also be impractical to have one big build with everything in it because there are over 1500 modules on an average Wikipedia site. Many of these come from extensions and wiki-users and these modules are likely only needed/loaded on certain pages or in certain states of the interface. For more on that see Loader Client.
 * And it would not make efficient use of browser cache, since it would have to invalidate the entire "build" if even the slightest change is made (the solution that ResourceLoader has for this is explained under Balance).

Whenever a module is requested from the server, the above is evaluated. If needed, the cache will be re-generated. All phases of the packaging process have been optimized to be able to run on-demand on the web server. No build scripts, no periodic cron tasks.

Conclusion


In conclusion we'd like to think of ResourceLoader as creating a development environment that is optimized for:


 * Happy developers Easy to work with modules without worrying about optimization, maintenance, building and what not.
 * Happy servers The application itself is lightweight, scales well and is optimized to run on-demand.
 * Happy users Faster pages!

JavaScriptMinifier
Although the re-generation of a module package should be relatively rare (since cache is very well controlled), when it does happen it has to perform well from a web server.

For that reason it doesn't use the famous JSMin.php library (based on Douglas Crockford's JSMin) because it is too slow to run on-demand during a request response. Although JSMin.php only takes about 1 second for (which is okay if you're on the command-line), when working on-demand in a web server response (with potentially dozens of large files needing to be minified) waiting this long is unacceptable. Especially if potentially thousands of requests could come in at the same time, all finding out that the cache isn't up to date (to avoid a cache stampede).

Instead ResourceLoader uses an implementation of Paul Copperman's JavaScriptMinifier, which is up to 4X faster than JSMin. In addition to the speed, time has told that JavaScriptMinifier interprets the JavaScript syntax more correctly and succeeds in situations where JSMin outputs invalid JavaScript. The output size of JavaScriptMinifier is slightly larger than JSMin (about 0.5%; based on a comparison by minifying jquery.js, for which the difference was 0.8KB). The reason this is not considered a loss is because it is put in the bigger picture. ResourceLoader doesn't aim to compress as small as can be no matter the cost. Instead it aims for balance, get large gains in a wide range of areas while also featuring instant cache invalidation, fast module generation, a transparent "build"-free environment for the developer, etc. The fact that it could be a little bit smaller then becomes an acceptable trade off.

CSSMin
Features:
 * Minification
 * Remapping
 * Data URI Embedding