Performance and Storage
Because it is used to run one of the highest-traffic sites on the Web, Wikipedia, MediaWiki performance and scalability have been highly optimized. MediaWiki supports Squid, load-balanced database replication, client-side caching, memcached or table-based caching for frequently accessed processing of query results, a simple static file cache, feature-reduced operation, revision compression, and a job queue for database operations. According to Wikimedia Networking Coordinator Mark Bergsma, MediaWiki developers have attempted to optimize the software by not doing anything stupid, avoiding expensive algorithms, database queries, etc., caching every result that is expensive and has temporal locality of reference, and focusing on the hot spots in the code through profiling.
MediaWiki code is designed to allow for data to be written to a master database and read from slave databases, although the master can be used for some read operations if the slaves are not yet up to date. Metadata, such as article revision history, article relations (links, categories etc.), user accounts and settings can be stored in core databases and cached; the actual revision text, being more rarely used, can be stored as append-only blobs in external storage. The software is suitable for the operation of large scale wiki farms such as Wikimedia, which had about 800 wikis as of August 2011. However, MediaWiki comes with no built-in GUI to manage such installations.
Empirical evidence shows most revisions in MediaWiki databases tend to differ only slightly from previous revisions. Therefore, subsequent revisions of an article can be concatenated and then compressed, achieving very high data compression ratios of up to 100x.
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