richardcavell(a)mail.com wrote:
Hi all and TIA.
I usually run my bot with maxlag = 5 seconds.
When it attempts a
communication with Wikipedia, if it receives Error:maxlag or HTTP 503 ,
it retries up to 5 times with 10 seconds between each try. If it still
can't get through, it aborts. At the time I'm writing this, about 3pm
Friday afternoon in Australia, my bot is routinely aborting due to 5
maxlag or 503s in a row.
I am usually logged into #wikipedia and #wikipedia-en on Freenode, and
have noticed that many times I and other Australians will complain that
Wikipedia is very slow and timing out for human edits, when Americans
claim that they have no such problem at that time.
Currently I'm running the bot with maxlag = 10 seconds, and it's having
no problems now.
Is the maxlag parameter something that will change if I'm connecting
from Australia? May I be allowed some leniency for being on the other
side of the world, or does it not work like that? If maxlag > 5
seconds, does that mean I should stop wasting the server's time and run
my bot some other time?
Richard
The lag only affects the server themselves. It just means that at that
time the lag was between 5 and 10 seconds for several minutes.
You probably wan to take a look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop…
to see what's going on.