https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19262

--- Comment #35 from Rob Lanphier <[email protected]> 2011-09-07 05:04:38 UTC 
---
Here's what I'm saying:  current performance is too slow.  We know it's too
slow, and we have at least a couple initiatives that should make things
significantly faster, along with other less dramatic improvements that we
should also implement if we still have problems.

However, what I'm also saying is that there's no way to give people a general
purpose programming environment, and then expect that it's going to perform
well no matter what anyone throws at it.  It's just not possible.  It can
perform well for most reasonable tasks, and we're not *aware* of any tasks that
are unreasonable, but there's no guarantee that everything that every
programmer does is going to be reasonable.  The programmer may be trying to
accomplish something reasonable, but I've seen even very good programmers make
very poor performance choices in their code.  On a wiki anyone can edit, there
will almost always be someone(s) who is/are doing it wrong.

I believe that Brion's comment in 2006 was a reaction to the prevailing mood at
the time.  If I recall his account of things correctly, there was a lot of
pseudoscientific "thou shalt not use the foobar template, for you will anger
the performance gods, and they will smite the server kittehs".  He saw that
people were overreacting to advice about template performance, with no one
actually doing any genuine profiling.

So, now the pendulum seems to have swung in the other direction.  Yes, we need
references in articles.  Yes, there are plenty of other perfectly reasonable
uses of templates.  Don't stop doing those things.   That said, if there are
more efficient ways of achieving the same end using a more efficient template,
please, for pete's sake, make the template more efficient.  Also, please help
us figure out which templates are expensive and why they're expensive.  If we
can actually narrow down which parts of templates suck, developers may have a
better idea of what parts should be implemented directly in PHP or even C if
need be.

My point is this: there's not a "problem".  There are "problems".  Having this
all in a single bug suggests there is a single "problem", and that's what I
have a problem with.

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