Things are getting SPDYier

Over the past few weeks, developers have been working on improving Wikimedia's performance when users connect to it using SPDY, which is a faster network protocol that was developed by Google and adopted as a formal standard through HTTP/2. It is supported by most major browsers^[1] over HTTPS. Part of this work included deprecating and removing usage of the "bits" cluster that previously served resources like stylesheets, JavaScript, and other miscellaneous items. These resources are now served by the same domain; for the English Wikipedia it would be: <https://en.wikipedia.org/w/load.php>. Previously using HTTP 1.1, using multiple subdomains was a performance advantage due to a limit of the number of concurrent requests per domain. With SPDY, a domain can have an unlimited number of connections, but each individual domain has the same connection overhead. Users may still notice resources downloading from bits.wikimedia.org due to on-wiki user scripts and gadgets, which should be updated.

In other news:

• The "WikiGrok" project to send microcontributions to Wikidata has been put on hold ([2])
• The breaking change planned for the API's default continuation format has been scheduled for the 1.26wmf12 branch, and a list of the most affected bots has been provided. Please contact bot operators on the list to make sure they update their code! ([3])
• The Pywikibot team has published a first release candidate for the new 2.0 version for initial testing ([4])

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