Help:Job queue

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In MediaWiki 1.6, a job queue was introduced to perform long-running tasks asynchronously. The job queue is designed to hold many short tasks using batch processing. Up to MediaWiki 1.16, an estimate of the length of the job queue was shown at Special:Statistics. By default, each time a request runs, one job is taken from the job queue and executed.

Updating links tables when a template changes[edit]

MediaWiki 1.6 adds a job to the job queue for each article using a template. Each job is a command to read an article, expand any templates, and update the link table accordingly. So null edits are no longer necessary, although it may take a while for big operations to complete. This can help to ease strain on users.

HTML cache invalidation[edit]

A wider class of operations can cause invalidation of the HTML cache for a large number of pages:

  • Changing an image (all the thumbnails have to be re-rendered, and their sizes recalculated)
  • Deleting a page (all the links to it from other pages need to change from blue to red)
  • Creating or undeleting a page (like above, but from red to blue)
  • Changing a template (all the pages that transclude the template need updating)

Except for template changes and uploading a not previously existing file, these operations do not invalidate the links tables, but they do invalidate the HTML cache of all pages linking to that page, or using that image. Invalidating the cache of a page is a short operation; it only requires updating a single database field and sending a multicast packet to clear the caches. But if there are more than about 1000 to do, it takes a long time. By default, jobs are added when more than 500 pages need to be invalidated, one job per 500 operations.

Typical values[edit]

During a period of low loads, the job queue might be zero. At Wikimedia, the job queue is, in practice, almost never zero. In off-peak hours, it might be a few hundred to a thousand. During a busy day, it might be a few hundred thousand (values of several million are no cause for alarm), but it can quickly fluctuate by 10% or more.[1] Also as mentioned above, several servers will have different estimates for this value so apparently more varying fluctuations can also be seen.

As of MediaWiki 1.17, job queue length can be retrieved via the API at http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics ("jobs=").[2] On Wikipedia this value can come from one of several servers (three as of 2009) and so may fluctuate significantly.

As a special en.wiki monitoring tool, since August 2011 automatically generated graphs are available, but are broken as of 2013.[3] In April 2013, a graph for the global queue in all Wikimedia projects was available,[4] in addition to the processed items counts.[5] As of November 2015, those are broken, but new dashboards showing job queue health[6] and rate[7] are available.

See also[edit]

References[edit]

  1. ^ "leŭksman » Blog Archive » So what's in the job queue anyway?". Leuksman.com. 2008-04-22. Retrieved 2009-10-30.
  2. ^ mw:Manual:Job queue
  3. ^ On ganglia.
  4. ^ Ganglia (as of March 2014; old data on "hume").
  5. ^ Gdash.
  6. ^ Grafana job queue health dashboard
  7. ^ Grafana job queue rate dashboard