Wikimedia Performance Team/Web Perf Hero award

The Performance Team has been giving the Web Perf Hero award since mid-2020, to individuals who have gone above and beyond to improving the web performance of Wikimedia projects. It's awarded once a quarter (or less), and takes the form of a Phabricator badge.

Below are past recipients and why they've been given the Web Perf Hero award. Beyond specific recent projects that led to the award, they've all demonstrated repeated care, focus and discipline around performance.

SD0001
@SD0001 implemented Package files for Gadgets (T198758). This enables gadget maintainers to bundle JSON files, unpacked via. This improves performance by avoiding delays from extra web requests. It also improves security by allowing safe contributions to JSON pages, as pure data with validated syntax on-edit. Previously, admins on Wikimedia wikis for example, would need script editing access for this and rely on copy-paste instructions from another person via the talk page.

SD0001 also introduced  in ResourceLoader, and used it in the startup module to optimise away unneeded module registrations. We just shipped the first adoption of this for Gadgets (T236603). In the future, we'll use this to optimise MediaWiki's own skin modules as well.

Umherirrender
@Umherirrender has initiated and carried out significant improvements to the performance of MediaWiki user preferences (T278650, T58633, and T291748). The impact is felt widely and throughout Wikimedia sites. For example, when switching languages via the ULS selector, or exploring Beta Features and Gadgets, or switching skins. These are all powered by the MediaWiki "Preferences" component.

The work included implementing support for deferred message parsing in more HTMLForm classes, and applying this to the Echo and Gadgets extensions. This cut API latency by over 50%, from 0.7s to 0.3s at the median, and 1.2s to 0.5s at p95. (See graphs at T278650#7130951).

Kunal Mehta
@Kunal's work investigating and fixing performance differences during the Debian Buster upgrade was critical in understanding and mitigating the performance impact of that migration. If it wasn't for his initiative, that issue might have gone unnoticed or underestimated for some time and been much harder to understand and deal with.

Giuseppe Lavagetto
@Giuseppe's in-depth blog post about Envoy and PHP and all the underlying work that he did shows that he's willing to go the extra mile to improve the performance of our systems.

Nick Ray
Nick's in-depth analysis of the DOM order impact on performance was excellent and shows that how much work he does to ensure that he's building performant features.

Jon Robson
We hereby recognise the excellence of Jon's work converting image lazy loading to use IntersectionObserver, one of many projects he had the initiative of starting to improve the performance of our sites.