I don't know why Australia might be having trouble, unless the Christchurch earthquake irritated a cable.
The way I have my bots avoid irritating the servers is to back off very quickly, and slowly speed back up. Starting with a minimum of 5 seconds between updates... If there is no reply after 30 seconds, the bot sleeps for 60 seconds before retrying. Another failure increases the sleep time to 120 seconds. A successful update decreases the sleep time by 10 seconds, until the minimum 5 seconds is reached. So a slow period can slow the bot to several minutes between attempts, and it then takes many minutes to return to normal.
On Thu, 2011-03-03 at 23:44 -0500, richardcavell@mail.com wrote:
Hi all and TIA.
I usually run my bot with maxlag = 5 seconds.
When it attempts a communication with Wikipedia, if it receives Error:maxlag or HTTP 503 , it retries up to 5 times with 10 seconds between each try. If it still can't get through, it aborts. At the time I'm writing this, about 3pm Friday afternoon in Australia, my bot is routinely aborting due to 5 maxlag or 503s in a row.
I am usually logged into #wikipedia and #wikipedia-en on Freenode, and have noticed that many times I and other Australians will complain that Wikipedia is very slow and timing out for human edits, when Americans claim that they have no such problem at that time.
Currently I'm running the bot with maxlag = 10 seconds, and it's having no problems now.
Is the maxlag parameter something that will change if I'm connecting from Australia? May I be allowed some leniency for being on the other side of the world, or does it not work like that? If maxlag > 5 seconds, does that mean I should stop wasting the server's time and run my bot some other time?
Richard
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