Last modified: 2014-11-18 20:51:11 UTC

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Bug 49685 - (ve-performance) VisualEditor: Performance issues (tracker)
(ve-performance)
VisualEditor: Performance issues (tracker)
Status: ASSIGNED
Product: VisualEditor
Classification: Unclassified
General (Other open bugs)
unspecified
All All
: Normal normal
: ---
Assigned To: Editing team bugs – take if you're interested!
: performance, tracking
Depends on: 50616 51202 51569 52365 53093 53825 53826 57952 62755 64171 64772 68042 50084 52012 62812 64709 65453 65512 66914
Blocks: tracking ve-tracking
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2013-06-17 11:18 UTC by Oliver Keyes
Modified: 2014-11-18 20:51 UTC (History)
5 users (show)

See Also:
Web browser: ---
Mobile Platform: ---
Assignee Huggle Beta Tester: ---


Attachments
Stopped script warning (355.50 KB, image/png)
2013-06-30 19:41 UTC, Oliver Keyes
Details
Firefox chokes (398.36 KB, image/png)
2013-06-30 19:41 UTC, Oliver Keyes
Details
another stopped sript warning (482.28 KB, image/png)
2013-06-30 19:51 UTC, Carl Fürstenberg
Details

Description Oliver Keyes 2013-06-17 11:18:16 UTC
This is more of a tracking bug than anything else, but it should be something people are aware of and something that's formally logged; the VisualEditor is very slow on large articles, to the point where it causes confusing output.

Using the example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice - I edited this and it took a good 20 seconds just to render 'review changes', and another 20 to save. David Gerard did the same and the server popped up  "Error saving data to server: timeout." with both 'review' and 'save'. Despite this, it saved anyway.

Obviously as a long-term thing: we shouldn't have an editor so slow that someone in an industrialised, Western nation (i.e. the UK) can't make things work.[1] As a short-term thing, we shouldn't be informing users "something has gone terribly, terribly wrong, abort!" when it has actually saved.

[1] It's David Gerard, he's not going to be using dial-up.
Comment 1 David Gerard 2013-06-17 12:09:49 UTC
Specifically, 8Mbit ADSL through Zen. Most of the slowness appears to be thinking - I could hear my laptop's CPU fan speed up.
Comment 2 James Forrester 2013-06-17 18:57:31 UTC
Listing the issues so it's clear what we mean by "performance issues" and their different causes and artefacts:

* [network] VE slow to load own JS - mostly provided by ResourceLoader and local cacheing so this would only be a slowness once per user's browser (assuming they don't clear their local cache); we could pre-load VE JS for all users on read, which would reduce load times when people press edit slightly, but that is evil

* [network] VE slow to fetch HTML from Parsoid - mostly fixed due to highly-aggressive caching at our cluster (the payload is slightly smaller in byte size than the read page fetch, i.e. not significant)

* [client] VE slow to render Parsoid HTML into an editable document - we're working on this (profiling etc.), but there's a tension between editability and simplicity of data structure. :-)

* [client] VE slow to respond to user action - same as above; this is the core "performance" area for VE itself, of course

* [server] VE slow to get a wikitext diff - this relies on two operations; a Parsoid serialise and an MW wikitext diff: we can work with Parsoid on that being faster, but there's a limit; theoretically we could pre-serialise as we go (but eww network traffic and load on the servers)

* [server] VE slow to save edit - this is essentially the same performance issue as getting the wikitext diff, above; theoretically we could optimise by saving the output of the serialise from a wikitext diff, but this won't be triggered for most users, so it's of marginal utility
Comment 3 David Gerard 2013-06-17 19:04:38 UTC
It may also be worth noting that this page takes ~30 seconds in my use to save when using the ordinary source wikitext editor - it's a complex page!
Comment 4 James Forrester 2013-06-17 19:21:06 UTC
(In reply to comment #3)
> It may also be worth noting that this page takes ~30 seconds in my use to
> save when using the ordinary source wikitext editor - it's a complex page!

Yes, one of the problems is that VE being slow is rather more noticeable than MW being slow (because "it's a website" and so triggers different time response expectations in users). :-(
Comment 5 David Gerard 2013-06-18 13:00:22 UTC
It was previously doing a very dirty diff; I just tried again on this article and it did a clean diff, but timed out when I hit "save", three times in a row, and didn't actually save any of them.
Comment 6 Oliver Keyes 2013-06-30 19:41:24 UTC
Created attachment 12702 [details]
Stopped script warning
Comment 7 Oliver Keyes 2013-06-30 19:41:48 UTC
Created attachment 12703 [details]
Firefox chokes

This happens /before/ script-stop warnings.
Comment 8 Carl Fürstenberg 2013-06-30 19:51:20 UTC
Created attachment 12704 [details]
another stopped sript warning
Comment 9 David Gerard 2014-03-01 08:57:51 UTC
Update on the test Oliver mentions at the top: on the same PC and the same Internet connection (though a current version of Firefox), it just now took:

* 10 seconds to open [[OpenOffice.org]]
* 176 seconds (nearly three minutes!) to render the "Review your changes" diff
* two minutes attempting to save, then "Error: Unknown error". The edit did, however, save: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=OpenOffice.org&diff=597641893&oldid=593809275

It's a ... test subject ... of a page.

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