Performance strategies for delivering web fonts at Wikipedia scale
summary
Wikipedia serves roughly half a billion monthly users and actively supports 115 web fonts across ~287 languages while pushing 82 font files and using default web fonts for 66 languages; average file size is about 153 KB (smallest 3.6 KB, largest 772 KB). The pipeline uses a resource loader, server and client caching (CSS cache ~24 hours, fonts can be cached up to one year), dynamic tofu detection (Chinese detection <90% accurate) and on-the-fly Harfbuzz subsetting to trim glyph sets and cut bandwidth.
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chapters (23)
- 0:00Start
- 1:54Where Does Wikipedia Need Fonts
- 2:38Web Fonts
- 3:17Purpose of Using Web Fonts
- 4:25Providing Accessibility Support
- 6:10System Font
- 10:09Distribution of Web Fonts
- 11:18Cash Eviction
- 11:39Repeated Font Download
- 12:15Font Optimization
- 12:59Tofu Detection
- 16:05Stripping Compressing Subsetting
- 16:59Compression
- 17:37Subsetting
- 19:07Caching Period for a Font
- 21:16Font Subsetting
- 22:56Determining When a Web Font Is Applied
- 27:56Adobe Web Fonts
- 29:07Inconsistencies in Rendering
- 29:58Transfer Latency
- 31:26System Support for Web Fonts
- 37:46The Google Fonts Api
- 46:16Font Forge
