[Wikipedia-l] performance tweak

Wed Nov 6 00:08:11 UTC 2002

This is a repost in plain readable ascii.

I wonder how much web bandwidth and server processing power is consumed
by diligent wikipedians browing the list of 'recent changes', checking
an article and returning to the list by pressing the back button, thus
generating a new request to the database, over and over again. An
expensive request as well, in terms of database processing (I presume)
and html page size, up to 500 records might be sent. 

My suggestion: a very simple change would reduce this load on the server
considerably: add target="_blank" to each link on the 'recent changes'
page only. Now articles will be shown in a new window. The 'recent
changes' list will only be refreshed when the user explicitly asks for
it (via refresh button or menu click). This may alleviate slow response
times somewhat. 

Not posted on the technical mailing list, since functionality will
obviously change (for the better in my view, I would like a subsecond
redisplay of the changes list). 

Erik Zachte