Wikipedia has become so slow as to be almost unusable at times for me
in the last 10 days, both for reading and editing. Pages are taking
minutes to load. There are problems saving edits - even when they
appear to be saved, when I check they're not there (even though my
name is in the edit history); and sometimes when they appear not to
have been saved, when I check, they ARE there. As of the last hour or
so, it won't save edits at all. We must be losing a lot of readers,
and will start to lose editors. I know from my own experience of doing
online research, that if a website takes even a few seconds longer to
load than I expect it to, I move on, and when I see that website
again, I don't even try it. So losing readers even once can mean
losing them forever.
There's a page for discussion of this here
http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status, but
it seems to be largely editors reporting their problems. Could one of
the people who's working on the problem post an explanatory note on
that page, or on the main page? There are a couple of notes from Tim
from a few days ago, but they don't seem to explain why there has been
such a significant change in the last 10 days (If it is explained, my
apologies for not having understood it).
Some people have said the slowness is caused by an increase in
requests-per-second, but I wonder whether that's an effect of the
problem, rather than a cause, because of editors having to make
multiple requests for pages before they appear.
It seems to me that there's been a change in kind, not degree, in the
last 10 days. Any information from those who may know what has caused
this would be much appreciated.
Slim