For those not spending 24hrs/day in #mediawiki, here are some updates:
The file cache has been turned off. It was largely redundant, since the
squids handle upstream caching, and it caused congestion on the NFS
server. Moving the file cache onto each server's local disk would be
possible but so far doesn't look like it'd be worth the effort.
Output compression has been enabled globally for browsers that support
it. (Formerly this was special-cased in the file cache as a side effect
of compressing the cached pages for disk savings.) Some browsers may be
briefly confused during the switchover if they get a 304 response for a
page that is _now_ compressed but wasn't before. Mozilla is known to
have such problems. Close the browser and restart; that will probably
clear it up. If not, give a shout.
The additional compression doesn't seem to hurt load on the servers,
and it'll cut bandwidth usage further.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)