 | This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. Ordinary editors do not need to do any of this. Even if you are editing a particularly slow template then just pasting several copies into a sandbox will do as a benchmark. |
This essay on benchmarking describes techniques and limits in measuring performance issues on Wikipedia. The term "benchmarking" has been used for many decades in testing computer performance. For example, with Wikipedia pages, a common technique is to invoke a template repeatedly, perhaps 400 times copied down a page, during an edit-preview, to check the duration of the 400 instances. The time span for each instance is, then, the total time minus 0.3 seconds (as minimum page-load), divided by 400. Timings of repeated text are limited to spans of about 1 minute, total time, otherwise the page could trigger a "WP:Wikimedia Foundation error" as cancelling the reformat due to a page-timeout limit.