Wikipedia talk:Historical archive/Lag

Sorry about the nearly one-hour lag tonight, folks. I submitted a long query, and that brought everything to a grinding halt. Brion restarted the server at around 8:45 P.M. Eastern US time, and we're back up. For penance, i will stay off Wikipedia for the next 48 hours. :-( Ed Poor

Peak performance times

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump

Why is wikipedia always so slow around these times, and are there any plans to upgrade the server to get better performance? Sometimes it takes up to a minute of waiting to submit something, and accessing pages can take long times too.

Jedi Dan 13:27 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

I have no idea. I understand that the hardware is ample, so it seems to be a software problem. (To do with the peculiarities of database organisation, I seem to remember Bryon saying a while back.) But it seems to be consistently slowest between about 9PM and 3AM Eastern Australian time (err .. that's GMT -11, I think), which I can never work out, as the Australians (late evening) and the Europeans (mid-morning) are on, but most Americans are in bed. Go figure. Tannin 13:50 Apr 25, 2003 (UTC)

Cleared page cache

Moved from Wikipedia:Village pump on Friday, June 13th, 02003.

Is there a reason why Wikipedia is very slow today? Or is this something I have to get used to? It is a little frustrating when it takes so long to see the edit screen that I forget what I was going to edit :) Kingturtle 18:26 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The page cache has been cleared to accomodate recent updates to the software, so every page needs to get regenerated and stored at least once as it's first revisited. That may slow things down a bit for a day or two. --Brion 18:40 9 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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Hi, today Wikipedia is EXTREMELY slow (sometimes 5 Minutes to show a page). I tried it from Germany, I also tried it from Holland, Always the same (over the whole day...) Is there a Server-Problem? Thanks, Fantasy 18:54 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

slow page loads is an ongoing problem of Wikipedia. I noticed a slight problem for a few minutes, but it has since passed. It's something I have gotten used to. It would be nice for someone to isolate the problem :). MB 19:21 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I've had the same problem lately. I'm placed in Norway. In France one week ago, through a pay-to-surf, I wasn't even able to load the mainpage. Sigg3.net 19:32 7 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I personally don't have so big problems with it. But it is specially embarrasing, when you show a "possible" new Wikipedian the page, and after some minutes you have to look for excuses... I think we loose a lot of future Wikipedians by this problem... Fantasy 07:11 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

The answer is that we need both more servers, and more optimisation of the Wikipedia code. The first takes money, the second takes time. -- The Anome 07:28 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

If the money is a problem, I am ready to contribute. How can that be done? Fantasy 07:35 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Talk to Jimbo; he's in the process of getting a non-profit org set up to manage this stuff, but I don't think it's quite yet in a position to accept donations.

PS: is there a way to donate money to the developers (eg. functions implemented...)? I have the feeling, improving Wikipedia has also some "value"...

I personally will be happy to take your money. :) However I'm not in a position to commit to new tasks presently; in my spare time I'm just trying to keep things running and, hopefully, get the software upgrades and database updates installed all around. You can try to tantalize other developers with WikiMoney or offer something a little more tangible for new developments. --Brion 07:45 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Can we disable searching again? That seemed to help last time... Martin

I've got it in title-search-only mode for the moment. It also may be faster to switch to mysql's boolean search mode, particularly for multi-word searches. --Brion 09:35 8 Jul 2003 (UTC)