Last modified: 2011-10-07 21:00:52 UTC
This is with mediawiki 1.8.2 If a spammer posts a page revision a with 2000 lines of spam links which are enclosed in square brackets, then a subsequent 'diff' of that page with the previous revision can cause mediawiki to hang and cause httpd to peg the CPU. Repeated occurances of this on a server (even over a period of days) can cause multiple httpd processes to hang, and can eventually cause total depletion of the system's swap space.
Under FC5 with apache-2.2.2 and php-5.1.4
This problem quickly gets huge if such a diff is included in the rss feeds. I had to disable recent changes feeds on my mediawiki site because it immediately (after a httpd restart) started using up about all apache and system resources.
Siteowners might be interested in knowing that using the wikidiff2 extension dodges this bug.
This is because the built-in difference engine is rather slow and inefficient when called multiple times; if wikis are large enough that a large number of diff requests are anticipated, then the wikidiff2 extension should be installed, which is a compiled form of the same algorithm, and works a lot faster.
*** Bug 14867 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Reducing priority/severity, nobody cares.
It would be nice to have a) a faster default implementation and b) cleaner resource limits so ultra-long diffs can be aborted internally without killing the whole UI or RSS feed generation.
*** Bug 20041 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
*** Bug 9410 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
Can anyone reproduce this on MediaWiki 1.17.0 or later? I just played around a bunch with 1.18 via a test wiki <https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/test2/wiki/Why_is_there_an_article%3F> and couldn't reproduce the issue. Please reopen if you can reproduce this problem on a recent version of MediaWiki.
