2009/6/26 Robert Rohde <raro...@gmail.com>: > I'm going to mention this here, because it might be of interest on the > Wikimedia cluster (or it might not). > > Last night I deposited Extension:Minify which is essentially a > lightweight wrapper for the YUI CSS compressor and JSMin JavaScript > compressor. If installed it automatically captures all content > exported through action=raw and precompresses it by removing comments, > formatting, and other human readable elements. All of the helpful > elements still remain on the Mediawiki: pages, but they just don't get > sent to users. > > Currently each page served to anons references 6 CSS/JS pages > dynamically prepared by Mediawiki, of which 4 would be needed in the > most common situation of viewing content online (i.e. assuming > media="print" and media="handheld" are not downloaded in the typical > case). > > These 4 pages, Mediawiki:Common.css, Mediawiki:Monobook.css, gen=css, > and gen=js comprise about 60 kB on the English Wikipedia. (I'm using > enwiki as a benchmark, but Commons and dewiki also have similar > numbers to those discussed below.) > > After gzip compression, which I assume is available on most HTTP > transactions these days, they total 17039 bytes. The comparable > numbers if Minify is applied are 35 kB raw and 9980 after gzip, for a > savings of 7 kB or about 40% of the total file size. > > Now in practical terms 7 kB could shave ~1.5s off a 36 kbps dialup > connection. Or given Erik Zachte's observation that action=raw is > called 500 million times per day, and assuming up to 7 kB / 4 savings > per call, could shave up to 900 GB off of Wikimedia's daily traffic. > (In practice, it would probably be somewhat less. 900 GB seems to be > slightly under 2% of Wikimedia's total daily traffic if I am reading > the charts correctly.) > > > Anyway, that's the use case (such as it is): slightly faster initial > downloads and a small but probably measurable impact on total > bandwidth. The trade-off of course being that users receive CSS and > JS pages from action=raw that are largely unreadable. The extension > exists if Wikimedia is interested, though to be honest I primarily > created it for use with my own more tightly bandwidth constrained > sites.
This sounds great but I have a problem with making action=raw return something that is not raw. For MediaWiki I think it would be better to add a new action=minify What would the pluses and minuses of that be? Andrew Dunbar (hippietrail) > -Robert Rohde > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l > -- http://wiktionarydev.leuksman.com http://linguaphile.sf.net _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
