[WikiEN-l] Break

Sat Sep 20 05:34:04 UTC 2003

On Thu, 2003-09-18 at 07:41, K Forstner wrote:
> Wikipedia actually forces me to take an indefinite break until the whole
> thing is running properly again. A couple of days ago, I wikified a long
> page and for once forgot to copy it before pressing the "save" button.
> Needless to say, the whole thing was lost irrevocably before I had realized
> my mistake. Yesterday I was careless again and added five titles to
> Kingturtle's reading list -- lost forever. Now I just wanted to update a
> page -- impossible.
> 
> I'm still amazed that this is not being discussed.

You're obviously not reading the same barrels and barrels of complaints
I am. :)

There's been some more concrete discussion on wikitech-l, the
developers' list. If you can give actual useful advice based on
experience running high-load web servers, then please do.

We *know* it's slow. Everyone here knows it's slow, and posting about
the fact that it's slow is not going to shock us into flipping the magic
"don't be slow" switch, because there just isn't such a switch.

Hardware upgrades (new processors, _much_ faster for the web server, and
more memory which can be devoted to caching data to avoid hitting the
db/disk so much) have been ordered and should be installed next week.

If you have real, useful ideas on improving the efficiency of our setup,
or better yet can code up improvements and submit patches to the
software, then *please please please* join wikitech-l and get a-postin'.
For those that just want to bitch about how slow the server is, may I
direct you to our IRC channel: #wikipedia on irc.freenode.net. ;)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)