[Licom-l] License transition vote setup

Fri Apr 10 15:33:45 UTC 2009

On Fri, Apr 10, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Michael Schultheiss
<schultmc at spi-inc.org> wrote:
> Robert Rohde wrote:
>> Michael,
>>
>> I was doing some editing on the wiki yesterday evening and noticed
>> intermittent problems on a number of occasions.  Typically I would
>> observe that the page I was looking at loaded okay but one or more
>> ancillary items (e.g. toolbar icons, stylesheets, etc.) would not show
>> up.  This was especially noticeable at times when the main stylesheet
>> seemed to not load so my browser displayed an unformatted page.  (Has
>> anyone else witnessed this behavior?)
>>
>> If I am seeing some problems all by myself, I am concerned what might
>> happen when we let the rampaging hordes of Wikipedians loose.
>>
>> I am wondering if you might check your server logs for error messages
>> that might explain intermittent failures of content to load.
>>
>> Since all of the wiki's content is being run though SSL, is it
>> possible that the extra overhead associated with all of Mediawiki's
>> CSS, JS, and other calls is overtaxing things?  Even given Mediawiki
>> propensity to call up lots of supplemental pages it doesn't seem
>> reasonable that a single editor could be bad enough to cause dropped
>> connections.
>>
>> Or perhaps Tim may have some ideas for what can cause requests to
>> occasionally fail on an otherwise clean install.
>>
>> Unfortunately since the problem was intermittent (and often fixed by
>> hitting reload) I don't really have any direct way to demonstrate it.
>
> The error logs have entries like:
>
> [Fri Apr 10 15:15:35 2009] [error] access to
> /skins/common/commonPrint.css failed for 87.186.103.210, reason: Client
> exceeded connection limit.
>
> I can look into increasing the connection limits but that server has
> rather limited resources and I'd hate to overload it.

By underlying concern is that this occurred without my trying to do
anything unusual (or particularly fast).  Mediawiki is by its nature
something of a connection hog (how many stylesheets and javascript
pages does a single page need really?).  Also, there may be an issue
with caching not functioning properly since things seemed to reload
far more often than seemed reasonable.

Perhaps Brion / Tim can advise on what good settings are.

-Robert