Submissions/How we made VisualEditor faster

This is an accepted submission for Wikimania 2015.

Submission no.
3030
Title of the submission
How we made VisualEditor faster
Type of submission (discussion, hot seat, panel, presentation, tutorial, workshop)
Presentation
Author of the submission
Ori Livneh and Roan Kattouw
E-mail address
ori@wikimedia.org and roan@wikimedia.org
Username
Ori Livneh and Roan Kattouw
Country of origin
IL and NL (now USA)
Affiliation, if any (organisation, company etc.)
Wikimedia Foundation
Personal homepage or blog
—
Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal)
VisualEditor's performance – the speed of the editor in loading when you want it, doing things when you click, and saving when you save edits – matters. It matters because poor performance is distracting for experts, dissuasive for newbies, and disrespectful for the time of both. This isn't just servicing the desires of the impatient amongst us – a responsive user interface has been shown across hundreds of systems and designs to help users maintain focus on what they want to get done. The most important facility that the editing system can provide is to appear near-invisible — a tool you can use without even thinking about it, a smooth and unnoticeable machine which works instantly to flawlessly effect whatever changes you wish to make, without you needing to think about it.
Recently, we've undertaken a lot of work to improve the performance of VisualEditor, which we will demonstrate, graph, dissect and discuss, including specific benchmarks, known existing bottlenecks, and our plans for the future in terms of code and architecture optimisations which will improve performance still further.
We will showcase the instrumentation of performance in VisualEditor's world, giving a "behind the scenes" view of VisualEditor, the EventLogging framework and how we couple the two. We will demonstrate how we have used the instrumentation to detect and isolate performance bottlenecks,
We will discuss the difference between clock-time and perceived performance, and give an overview of the tensions between network, CPU, and memory performance constraints within which we operate, our performance targets, and how far away they are. We will cover how our work has been shared between VisualEditor and the wikitext editor, and what the future looks like, once we make even more changes to how MediaWiki works so that your editing experience is as fast and seamless as possible.
Track
Technology, Interface & Infrastructure
Length of session (if other than 30 minutes, specify how long)
30 minutes
Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?
Yes
Slides or further information (optional)
File:How we made VisualEditor faster.pdf
Special requests
—


Interested attendees

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  1. Daniel Mietchen (talk) 23:28, 18 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. --Elitre (WMF) (talk) 17:56, 23 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Krinkle (talk) 17:51, 24 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Santhosh.thottingal (talk) 03:47, 25 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Legoktm (talk) 02:28, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Tpt (talk) 20:15, 28 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  7. I wasn't the visual editor's greatest fan, so I'll be very interested in finding out how improvements are being made. CT Cooper · talk 21:24, 2 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  8. Ocaasi (talk) 18:11, 3 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  9. Risker (talk) 00:55, 8 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  10. ESanders (WMF) (talk) 16:40, 15 March 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  11. Sebastian Wallroth (talk) 10:10, 1 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  12. eranroz (talk) 08:10, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  13. बिप्लब आनन्द (talk) 15:41, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  14. Add your username here.
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