On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:12:46 -0400, Bill Clark <wclarkxoom(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for
me.
Method: Keep open a browser window in Firefox with two tabs, one
pointing to the En WP the other the Fr WP. Refresh both tabs at the
same time, wait to see which finishes loading first.
Results:
French Wikipedia wins: 11 times
English Wikipedia wins: 5 times
Tie: 5 times
I'd run a script to test this but I don't want to hit the server that
much. Before I started keeping track I'd run another dozen or two
tests and the French Wikipedia won most of them.
I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue, but not just cached
ordering of the list. I'm not sure how the browser decides to do
lookups that are made basically at the same time, but if it's
alphabetical then the French Wikipedia might always get the IP after
the English Wikipedia IP during the rotation.
So if the speed of the servers happens to decrease roughly in order of
IP (so that .235 is slightly faster than .236, which is slightly
faster than .245, etc.) then the French Wikipedia would only get
assigned the faster IP one things loop back around from .248 back to
.235 again. Things don't seem quite that bad, but if anything like
that pattern holds then this might explain the differences in speed.
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due
to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
-Bill Clark