Wikipedia:Don't worry about performance
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The Wikimedia Foundation is fast-growing and, as a non-profit organization unwilling to fund itself through advertising, it is perennially short on cash. Therefore, site performance may not always be what it should be: the site may be slow, it may act strangely, it may even crash. But you, as a user, do not have to worry about site performance. In the overwhelming majority of cases, there is nothing you can do to appreciably speed up or slow down the site's servers. The software is, on the whole, designed to prohibit users' actions from slowing it down much.
In a few cases, there are things sysops can do that will slow down or crash the site. These are, however, rare and not generally worth worrying about. On the rare occasion they occur, follow instructions from the system administrators who come in to pick up the pieces, and everything will be fine. Obviously you shouldn't do exactly the same thing again, but don't be afraid to do similar things. If you get chastised for trying to delete Wikipedia:Sandbox and crashing the site, don't try to delete the same page again, but also don't fearfully count the revisions of every page you want to delete. That gets in the way of the point of Wikipedia more than a minor temporary slowdown or twenty minutes' downtime. If you're unsure about something, you can ask a sysadmin on IRC if it makes you feel better, but generally it's not necessary.
That said, listen to the system administrators if they tell you not to do something. You don't have to worry about performance normally, but the safeguards we have in place are not perfect. Citing this page in response to a sysadmin noting poor performance on some level or forbidding some behavior (as has been done with past incarnations) completely misses the point: performance is an issue, just not one that will typically come up for users, and not one that anyone not involved with Wikimedia server administration on a continual basis (you know who you are) is fully qualified to speculate about. So don't worry about it unless a sysadmin tells you to, as will happen on very rare occasions. Then, and only then, should you worry about performance.
Some quotes from other developers in other contexts
Site operations and keep-alive stuff is our concern. "Our" refers to
the development team and the system administration team, but I lump it all together for this. If something is *needed* in order to get on with the encyclopaedia-writing, or the dictionary-making, then do it. If it's unclean, let us know, and if there's an easier method we can implement to help, we will.
Adopt common sense, of course. If it's plain something could cause drastic problems, hold fire and check. But don't go running around screaming "teh servers, teh servers!!!" as an excuse to not do stuff, that's stupid.
Generally, you should not worry much about little things like templates and "server load" at a policy level. If they're expensive, we'll either fix it or restrict it at a technical level; that's our responsibility. . . .
As a technical matter, it's our responsibility to keep the system running well enough for what the sites require. In other words: it's not a policy issue. If and when we need to restrict certain things, we'll do so with technical measures. . . .
"Policy" shouldn't really concern itself with server load except in the most extreme of cases; keeping things tuned to provide what the user base needs is our job.
— Brion Vibber (Wikimedia Foundation Chief Technical Officer, ultimate authority on Wikimedia servers and software), Village Pump, 21 Jan 06
However - please be sensible about applying this guideline...
I made a general recommendation not to go running around saying THE SKY
IS FALLING THE SKY IS FALLING about templates BASED ON SUPPOSITION AND PARANOIA.
That doesn't mean that AN ACTUAL PROBLEM, WHEN DISCOVERED, SHOULD BE IGNORED.
WHEN THERE IS AN ACTUAL, REAL, MEASURABLE PROBLEM, THEN IT MATTERS.
— Brion Vibber (Wikimedia Foundation Chief Technical Officer, ultimate authority on Wikimedia servers and software), wikitech-l, 16 Jan 07
Addendum
It has come to my attention that this has been referred to as reason to use thumbnails with a large size in bytes instead of a smaller size in bytes (e.g., using a high-fidelity 50 KB PNG instead of an uglier 20 KB JPEG). I should note, therefore, that this essay applies only to affecting server-side performance issues, and in fact you can definitely slow down the loading of pages if you cram them with 100 KB images. Whether that's acceptable to you is an editorial choice, and there's not really much the developers or system administrators can or will do to either prevent or encourage it. —Simetrical (talk • contribs) 05:21, 11 July 2007 (UTC); 18:29, 18 September 2007 (UTC)
Examples
Examples of places where performance has been erroneously cited in the past:
- Wikipedia:Redirect#Do not change links to redirects that are not broken (performance was cited as a reason against the guideline; see rebuttal here)
Examples of restrictions that developers have put into place at least partly due to performance: