On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:54:16 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales
<jwales(a)wikia.com> wrote:
Anthere reports that there is a general impression
among the French
that
en.wikipedia.org loads faster than
fr.wikipedia.org. Is this
possible?
Can we run some tests?
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
I suspect this is at least partly just an instance of selective
observation. For some people, one site probably loads slightly faster
than the other for whatever random routing reason. Those who see the
French site load first aren't going to complain, but those who see the
English site load first _will_ complain. Hence, you only hear one
side of what's really a two-sided issue.
Or at least that's my guess.
It could also be something about the round-robin DNS:
root@xoom:~>host
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
root@xoom:~>host
fr.wikipedia.org
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236
fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
Some browsers will choose an IP at random, but others take the first
in the list. Maybe it's just that .246 is faster than .247 and some
people's DNS servers have the order cached that way so the same IP is
always returned first.
-Bill Clark