Help:Job queue
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In MediaWiki 1.6, a job queue was introduced to perform long-running tasks asynchronously. The job queue is designed to hold many short tasks using batch processing. Up to MediaWiki 1.16, an estimate of the length of the job queue was shown at Special:Statistics. By default, each time a request runs, one job is taken from the job queue and executed.
Updating links tables when a template changes
MediaWiki 1.6 adds a job to the job queue for each article using a template. Each job is a command to read an article, expand any templates, and update the link table accordingly. So null edits are no longer necessary, although it may take a while for big operations to complete. This can help to ease strain on users.