Brickimedia / brickimedia

Brickimedia Source Code
http://www.brickimedia.org
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Redirects and performance #462

Closed neoncitylights closed 8 years ago

neoncitylights commented 8 years ago

Each time a user tries to go to a redirect, it adds an extra request called a HTTP request-response, and that slows down the rendering of a page. Meaning, the process of getting from point A to point B will be slower than normal. It has to reload not only the HTML, but CSS, JS, images, and then also from the server-side (PHP). (Correct me if I'm wrong)

Data

Let's look at the data and see how many redirects we have per wiki as of 11:51 CST 02/26/2016 (mm/dd/yyyy)

Wiki Redirects Redirect chains Broken redirects
LEGO Ideas 163 0 0
Meta 344 3 0
Customs 83 6 2
Great Ball Contraption 45 0 0
Brickipedia 1000+ 0 2

Some things to note:

I did research on why we use redirects, so here are the reasons:

mary-kate commented 8 years ago

IMO redirects aren't that much of an issue and quite frankly, I think this sounds like a micro-optimization rather than anything else. If you have data to the contrary, I'm happy to be proven wrong. :)

That said, out of the reasons for using redirects that you listed, I think the "more sensible name" is one that we could and should weed out. Looking at Special:AllPages/File: on Meta, there are quite a few files named as such on the very first page of results. I wonder if the filename prefix blacklist could be of use in weeding out useless file names?

chriscook18 commented 8 years ago

Pedantic note: Welcomea is a different template to Welcome (at least at en. Not sure on other wikis). Pretty much the only one you could easily get rid of is the more sensible name file one. They shouldn't be redirected, but just renamed and changed on all uses.

Edward-Nigma commented 8 years ago

Point A "To avoid common misspellings", and Point E "Alternative capitalizing method" really shouldn't be in usage in the first place. They have no good reason to exist, especially the alternatively capitalised article redirects. They are incorrect, and generally, are not typed in that fashion.

NovaFlare commented 8 years ago

CirrusSearch sounds great- I miss having a dropdown menu with results coming up as I type. I don't like the idea of removing redirects though, as far as I'm concerned, the more the better (within reason). They help get people to where they need to be. And most of the time, the results that come up when you search for something are ridiculous- if I ever need to search for something on our site, I just use Google ([search term] site:en.brickimedia.org), which is partly why I'm so big on having redirects.

neoncitylights commented 8 years ago

@NovaFlare: Yeah, I agree with the CirrusSearch part. As for Google: What's nice is that their AI engine has learned over many years and can return results itself that's lowercase and/or uppercase, and can easily detect misspellings in many many different languages.

Once the site is back up, we could at least try and weed out the unnecessary ones:

Then we can go from there, sound good?

neoncitylights commented 8 years ago

Move to a community discussion at some point later on