This task tracks the deployment of the mediawiki-services-chromium-render service (Proton, herein). Proton's development and deployment is storied but did, at one time, support the FY 2017-18 Q2 goal T181079: [GOAL] Provide an expanded reading experience by improving the ways that users can download articles of interest for later consumption.

Current status

RESTBase is mirroring 100% of all production traffic to Proton and discarding its responses. Services will switchover to Proton and start decommissioning mediawiki-services-electron-render (Electron, herein) when Proton has been handed over to Readers Infrastructure.

Release timeline

• 18th September 2018: RESTBase mirrors 25% of all production traffic to Proton (T186748#4595101)
• 18th October 2018: RESTBase mirrors 100% of all production traffic to Proton (T186748#4677976)
• Handover Proton to Readers Infrastructure (T210652)
• TBD: RESTBase sends 100% of all production traffic to Proton and serves its responses (T210651)

Past updates

Update 2017/11/21

At the time of writing (Tuesday, 21st November 2017), the mediawiki-services-chromium-render service is currently under active development and soon to have it's initial round of performance testing on non-production hardware.

After lengthy investigation, it was determined that the service must be run under Debian Stretch. This is because the service uses the puppeteer library, which requires an up-to-date version of the Chromium binary to be available and such a binary wasn't immediately available for Debian Jessie. Details of the investigation can be found:

• In T178189#3698691 onwards;
• In T178570: How should we get Chromium for use in puppeteer?; and
• In T180037: [Spike] Can the new render service run on Debian Stretch?

Per T178189#3740805, we (Readers Web) intend to deploy this new PDF rendering service alongside the current service in order to evaluate its performance with production traffic. Once we're all happy, then we can switch out the services and decommission the superseded service.