[WikiEN-l] Re: Watchlist and time-wasting (was: Wik)

Fri May 7 00:56:04 UTC 2004

Poor, Edmund W wrote:
> How much strain on the server does a long watchlist cause? If limiting a
> watchlist to 100 entries would reduce my average WikiWait time from 5
> seconds to 4 seconds, I would be in favor of such a limit.
> 
> My two biggest time-wasters at Wikipedia are:
> *trolls and other fools
> *the 5-second-or-more time lage

We have disabled or restricted watchlists in the past, when we were 
working with less DB hardware. It doesn't seem to be necessary at the 
moment. Note that you can generally get faster response by reading 
articles with a different browser -- one where you're not logged in and 
have no Wikipedia cookies. That way, pages are served from the squid cache.

-- Tim Starling