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Story idea for Blog: Profiling PHP in production at scale
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Description

  • Provide a short summary of your proposed post for the Wikimedia Technical Blog. Blog readers will see this as the preview to your post:

We built an efficient sampling profiler for PHP. It runs continually in production on live requests, and generates trace logs and flame graphs.

  • Which topic type does your blog post fall under? Not sure, maybe "An important detail" or "Innovative work"
  • Which audience or audiences do you think your post is appropriate for? individuals working in Open Source and possibly wider technical industry.
  • Will you need assistance with writing your blog post, or do you already have a draft?

Went through drafts and copy-editing iterations with people in December for publishing at:
https://calendar.perfplanet.com/2020/profiling-php-in-production-at-scale/

No major changes planned, but would welcome suggestions. I'm able to update the above if the changes are minor.

  • Does your post need to be published by a certain date? No.

See also: Measuring Wikipedia page load times (techblog.wikimedia.org, 2018) which was published the other way around where it was on our blog first and only a few months later submitted to the Perf Calendar.

Event Timeline

@Krinkle This looks great! I should be able to get it up and posted in the next couple of days.

I don't see any licensing information for https://calendar.perfplanet.com. Do you know what this post is licensed under there? Just want to make sure that reposting elsewhere is allowed.

@Krinkle Pinging about the licensing info. I want to make sure that Perfplanet allows for the reposting of articles originally published there, but I don't see any information on the site. Do you know?

@srodlund It's my own writing which I permitted them to publish there (several of our team have editor access on Perfplanet). I will also publish it on my own blog after it goes on our Techblog, where I generallly use CC BY 4.0, which is compatible with our Techblog's default of CC BY-SA 4.0. In any event, I hereby release it also explicitly under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Hey @Krinkle -- This has been published: https://techblog.wikimedia.org/2021/03/03/profiling-php-in-production-at-scale/

Let me know if you see anything you want me to edit or change.

I see a 404 page there. It looks like the post is still in draft status when I login to the admin console.

Thanks for catching that!. I'm not sure what happened, but I republished from draft, and you should see it now!

I corrected 11 December 2021 to 11 December 2020 under "About this post" 😉, and removed two empty paragraphs and headings that snuck in.

I've added a license to the original as well for clarity.

I notice the footnotes don't currently correspond as the original did, which may be suboptimal for accessibility (each note refs the section overall instead of the individual item). However, due to our floating nav bar (and no adjustment for scroll/anchor offset), this is understandable as otherwise it would cause a different accessibility issue for sighted persons by having the text hidden behind the nav bar. This is a bug in the theme we may want to fix as this affects anchors and headings elsewhere too (example).

Wow! Good catch! Goes to show that you can't rely on spell-check alone!

RE the footnotes. We're planning on doing some design improvements to the theme next quarter, so I will make sure to add the footnote issue to our wishlist of design fixes. If there is anything else you notice, let me know, and we'll see if we can address it.