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
I was not precise enough. This feeling was quite strong about 3 or 4
weeks ago (or more ? time goes so quickly :-)). This was a time where
fr.wikipedia was nearly stuck every day around 7pm-9pm. When I say
"stuck", I really mean """stuck""". At that time,
I could go on editing
en or meta, it was very slow, but was definitly faster than fr.
Shai told me that the configuration a few weeks ago was different from
what it is right now.
In any cases, this slowliness is not the case any more. But I personally
have no idea of config changes, so had no idea it was different a while ago.
I think that the one-side or two-sided issue is not really relevant.
If you ask me, each time I go to the
www.wikimedia.org (now about a week
old), it is horribly slow to load pages. To the point that in spite of
my wish to work on this website, I have hardly done anything on it yet
because I do not have the patience to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a page
to load or save.
I know not what is the problem.
I just loaded the main page. The source writes
<!-- Served by
isidore.wikimedia.org in 0.20 secs. -->
Still the page took exactly 21 seconds to load.
Why ????
This is not "cultural" effect, this is just what I see.