Forum:MediaWiki 1.36 migration and server upgrade (please help test!)
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This page or section is an archive. Please do not edit the contents of this page. This thread was archived on 10 January 2022 by Legaia 2 Pla. |
tl;dr: please take a look at the new dev wikis (links below) and help us find issues with them.
Hi folks!
Some of our technical contributors (Kitty, Riblet, Andmcadams, Jayden, Gaz, me) have been working hard on upgrading our MediaWiki version from 1.31 to 1.36. This is the first MediaWiki upgrade for our network since the fork, so we've taken the opportunity to do a complete rework of our technical infrastructure. This includes:
- Moving webserver workloads away from OVH, onto containers and deploying them using kubernetes on Google Cloud Platform
- Moving database nodes away from OVH and onto Google's managed MySQL service
- Moving the image backend off the webservers and on to cloud storage
- Changing the parser cache to use memcached instead of Redis
It's a lot of big changes, but the end result is, it'll give us about 50% faster serving of web requests, (knock on wood) increased reliability and uptime, and greater ability to scale to higher demand, or quickly make new wikis, or spin up temporary test versions of the wikis as needed. This migration was also the main blocker for allowing user renames, although we're not yet ready to enable this.
>We need your help!<
We need more eyeballs to test the various changes (styling, gadgets, extensions, etc) that come with this upgrade. We've done a decent job of handling the most obvious things that need to be fixed, but there are a lot of little nooks where problems can hide.
That's why we're hoping to get a bunch of people to test out the development sites before we launch. You can see them here:
Please play around and try to break them. This includes stuff like:
- Make sure individual pages look good (for example, this looks very bad as of this writing)
- Check that the various gadgets and special pages seem to be working as intended
- Try editing a few things, uploading a picture (although only on a NEW filename please - this shares an image backend)
- Try out things like Semantic MediaWiki, searching
- Try to find unstyled content or things where the CSS looks different/worse than currently (especially dark mode)
- Try to find things that are just slower than expected
Please report anything you think isn't working right here, but we also are happy to have some discussion on Discord.
We'll give out the WikiGamebreaker title to whoever reports the most bugs. Maybe. No.
When is this launching?
The current general plan is to launch some time around November 21st, although that may change depending on how many further issues are discovered. This database migration will involve approximately 6-8 hours of read-only time where the wikis won't be editable, although they should continue to serve everything else just fine. We'll plan to do this at an off-peak time, as far away as possible from big game updates.
Thanks! ʞooɔ 20:14, 13 November 2021 (UTC)
Discussion
Update - We aim to perform maintenance on 20th November, 08:00 UTC. It should last approximately 6 hours. During this time, the wikis will be read-only. Template:Signatures/JaydenKieran 22:17, 19 November 2021 (UTC)
We did it! - We're now running successfully on Google Cloud and on MediaWiki 1.36. Thanks for being patient, especially as RSW was read-only for a bit longer than we wanted to while we ironed out some issues. There's been a few hiccups over the last few days, but things seem relatively stable now. If you spot any further issues across any of the wikis, please let us know on Discord (preferably in the #wiki-tech channel). Thanks! Template:Signatures/JaydenKieran 19:13, 25 November 2021 (UTC)
Closed - Per Jayden above. :) --Legaia 2 Pla ᴛ · ʟ · ᴄ 22:03, 10 January 2022 (UTC)