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performance, where the purpose of the servers is to support the wiki contents, not the other way around. The purpose of the wiki content is to serve the reader; and performance considerations can certainly play a part in that process. Using thumbnails with a large size in bytes instead of a smaller
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System administrators have access to a wealth of profiling, logging and administration data which allow them to easily identify performance bottlenecks. If a feature of the MediaWiki software is causing unacceptable performance on the cluster, MediaWiki developers or sysadmins will take appropriate
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Site operations and keep-alive stuff is our concern. "Our" refers to the development team and the system administration team, but I lump it all together for this. If something is *needed* in order to get on with the encyclopedia-writing, or the dictionary-making, then do it. If it's unclean, let us
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Particularly in the area of template design, optimising server performance is important, and it's frequently done by users with a great amount of impact. It's not very hard. I've done it myself from time to time, but it's best done by people with a knowledge of the templates in question and the
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be possible to do something which will result in permanent data loss or unfixable breakage. On the rare occasion something spectacular occurs, follow instructions from the sysadmins who come in to pick up the pieces, and everything will be fine. Obviously you shouldn't do exactly the same thing
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and crashing the site, don't try to delete the same page again, but also don't fearfully count the revisions of every page you want to delete. This damages
Knowledge (XXG) far more than a minor temporary slowdown. If you're unsure about something, you can ask a sysadmin on the
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In some areas the developers have provided tools with which you can more accurately measure performance, such as the template expansion limits, the parser report (present in a comment at the end of page content and on the edit preview page) or the profiling data in the
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179:; these staff members are responsible for providing a stable and responsive platform on which to run the wikis hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. That platform forms a cluster of over four hundred servers, with over five terabytes of
373:, then it is useful to edit it or templates and modules to make it perform better. This should be based on significant, measurable characteristics like load time, not hunches or efforts to simply save a few bytes here and there.
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As a technical matter, it's our responsibility to keep the system running well enough for what the sites require. In other words: it's not a policy issue. If and when we need to restrict certain things, we'll do so with technical
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Generally, you should not worry much about little things like templates and "server load" at a policy level. If they're expensive, we'll either fix it or restrict it at a technical level; that's our responsibility...
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Adopt common sense, of course. If it's plain something could cause drastic problems, hold fire and check. But don't go running around screaming "teh servers, teh servers!!!" as an excuse to not do stuff, that's
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Nothing in this page is to say that editors should not be mindful of performance, only that it should not limit project development. If a page is particularly slow to render, or coming up against
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the site. These are rare and not generally worth worrying about; although there are a few things admins can do maliciously which are very difficult to clean up, it should
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Some remedies made by sysadmins are not technical blocks, but 'ordinary' wiki edits. If a sysadmin makes an on-wiki change because of performance considerations,
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This would also eliminate most vandalism, edit-warring, POV-pushing, and personal attacks, but probably not all.
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measure; the
Wikimedia Foundation employs system administrators who will worry about site-wide performance.
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again, but don't be afraid to do similar things. If you get chastised for trying to delete
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a performance impact. Do not worry about the performance implications of things that you
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action to fix it. Examples of limitations introduced to avoid performance issues are the
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Wikimedia Foundation pays people to worry about performance, so you don't have to
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there is little you can do to appreciably speed up or slow down the site's servers
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That doesn't mean that AN ACTUAL PROBLEM, WHEN DISCOVERED, SHOULD BE IGNORED.
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IRC channel if it makes you feel better, but generally it's not necessary.
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know, and if there's an easier method we can implement to help, we will.
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WHEN THERE IS AN ACTUAL, REAL, MEASURABLE PROBLEM, THEN IT MATTERS.
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If the sysadmins identify a performance problem, they will fix it
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I made a general recommendation not to go running around saying
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Server performance is very important, but it's taken care of by
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restrictions on deleting pages with more than 5,000 revisions
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Editors cannot break the site, only admins can do that
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286:THE SKY IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING
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63:Shortcuts
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