Green SMW

by Nischay Nahata for Wikimedia Foundation

This project is about increasing the performance of Semantic MediaWiki -an Extension to MediaWiki which turns a wiki's information into a powerful database which can be processed and queried extensively. But when used with wikis with a lot of data it has a few performance degradation issues such as: 1. Frequent writes to the database (writes occur even if nothing has changed). 2. Some Special pages require expensive database queries, loading those takes lot of time. 3. RDF exports and RSS feeds (frequently generated by Users) require many string concatenations in PHP which are not efficient. 4. Pages that display large inline query results or use complex templates can lead to hundreds of database queries leading to slow performance. 5. SMW database was designed with an extendable storage abstraction layer in mind, but later the number of DataItems was fixed at 10, the database design thus needs a few refinements. My proposal is to improve the performance by making efficient use of the resources and implementing caching to reduce SMW's energy consumption.