Web Perf Hero award
The Web Perf Hero award is given to individuals who have gone above and beyond to improve the web performance of Wikimedia projects.
It is awarded once a quarter (or less), and takes the form of a Phabricator badge. The initiative was launched by Wikimedia Performance in 2020.
Below are past recipients along what the award is in recognition of. Beyond specific the project that led to the award, these individuals have demonstrated repeated care, focus, and discipline around performance.
2023
Máté Szabó
Máté (@TK-999) worked on improving MediaWiki’s autoloading mechanism at 853972 (task: T274041) specifically for classes which have been namespaced, by including them in the classmap. This means our autoloader will not spend significant amounts of time searching for files in directories, but rather just do a direct lookup. This approach is particularly optimized for speed and as a result, Wikipedia’s backend response time gained a 20% increase in the portion of requests that complete within 50ms.
Read more at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2024/01/16/web-perf-hero-mate-szabo/ and Wikitech-l thread.
2022
Valentín Gutierrez
Valentín (@Vgutierrez) improved ATS backend p75 latency by 25%, and reduced ATS p999 disk read latency by up to 1000X.
Read more at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/11/21/web-perf-hero-valentin-gutierrez/ and Wikitech-l thread.
Amir Sarabadani
Over the past six months, Amir (@Ladsgroup) significantly reduced the processing time and cost for saving edits in MediaWiki (Backend Save Timing). Not just once, but several times!
Read more at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/05/26/web-perf-hero-amir-sarabadani/ and Wikitech-l thread
2021
SD0001
Siddharth VP (@SD0001) implemented Package files for Gadgets. This improves performance by avoiding delays from extra web requests, and improves security by allowing safe contributions to JSON pages. In the future, we'll use this to optimise MediaWiki's core skin modules as well.
Read more at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2022/03/30/web-perf-hero-sd0001/ and Wikitech-l thread.
Umherirrender
Umherirrender initiated and carried out significant improvements to the performance of MediaWiki user preferences. The impact is felt widely and throughout Wikimedia sites.
Read more at https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/10/22/web-perf-hero-umherirrender/ and Wikitech-l thread
Kunal Mehta
@Kunal's work investigating and fixing performance differences during the Debian Buster upgrade was critical in understanding and mitigating the performance impact of that migration. If it wasn't for his initiative, that issue might have gone unnoticed or underestimated for some time and been much harder to understand and deal with.
Giuseppe Lavagetto
@Giuseppe's in-depth blog post about Envoy and PHP and all the underlying work that he did shows that he's willing to go the extra mile to improve the performance of our systems.
2020
Nick Ray
Nick's in-depth analysis of the DOM order impact on performance was excellent and shows that how much work he does to ensure that he's building performant features.
Jon Robson
We hereby recognise the excellence of Jon's work converting image lazy loading to use IntersectionObserver, one of many projects he had the initiative of starting to improve the performance of our sites.