Forum:Page speed improvements request from Wikia

Hey guys!

TOR here from Wikia’s Community Engineering team -- stopping by with a quick request for help from you.

The Community Engineering team exists to help our leaders, admins & power users build better communities. Part of that is building new tools (look for more on that in the near future at our staff blog on Community Central) and part is fixing bugs.

I’m here for the latter, as we need your help with a particular kind of bug -- some of your pages take a very long time to render (process) which can cause a confusing experience for your users and a bit of a slow down for all of Wikia.

Here’s a list of such pages on your wikia (note: these links lead directly to the classic editor in source mode):
 * Category:Cody Linley -- DPL makes this page slow to build, please consider removing the DPL parts (or at least removing some)
 * Category:David 12 -- same as above
 * Category:Danil Maydikov -- same as above
 * other category pages listed on Special:ParserSpeed

These pages take over 5 seconds to render (which means they’re over 10 times slower than the average page on Wikia). My team could jump in and fix this, but...

Well, first off you know your wikia better. You can probably fix the issues faster and in a cleaner way than we could, and we’d like to avoid changing things if you can fix the issue.

Also, we know some of you love to play with MediaWiki templates, and we wouldn’t want to have all the fun... ;)

The list above suggests some tactics to make the pages faster and leaner, but here’s some general performance tips on top of that:
 * try to keep the template structure relatively flat, if you can -- a template within a template within a template, etc... can get very slow indeed
 * avoid using DPL if you think a normal list or static parameter in a template will work just as well
 * don’t be afraid to break up big pages into smaller chunks
 * having several thousand images in one page is not a good idea (we’ve seen those ;))

I’ll be following this conversation, so feel free to ask questions and post comments here. Also, if you know any template specialists on your wikia, please let them know of this message.

And one more thing: we have a handy page where you can track the performance of your pages in the future -- ParserSpeed. It’s not perfect but it’ll tell you where the main problems are.

Thanks in advance for your help with this! And if you have any questions, let me know

Yours, Lucas ‘TOR’ Garczewski Community Engineering Manager