As you've probably noticed, the update lag on the public WDQS endpoint [1] is not doing well [2], with lag climbing to > 12h for some servers. We are tracking this on phabricator [3], subscribe to that task if you want to stay informed.

To be perfectly honest, we don't have a good short term solution. The graph database that we are using at the moment (Blazegraph [4]) does not easily support sharding, so even throwing hardware at the problem isn't really an option.

We are working on a few medium term improvements:

* A dedicated updater service in Blazegraph, which should help increase the update throughput [5]. Finger crossed, this should be ready for initial deployment and testing by next week (no promise, we're doing the best we can).

* Some improvement in the parallelism of the updater [6]. This has just been identified. While it will probably also provide some improvement in throughput, we haven't actually started working on that and we don't have any numbers at this point.

Longer term:

We are hiring a new team member to work on WDQS. It will take some time to get this person up to speed, but we should have more capacity to address the deeper issues of WDQS by January.

The 2 main points we want to address are:

* Finding a triple store that scales better than our current solution.

* Better understand what are the use cases on WDQS and see if we can provide a technical solution that is better suited. Our intuition is that some of the use cases that require synchronous (or quasi synchronous) updates would be better implemented outside of a triple store. Honestly, we have no idea yet if this makes sense and what those alternate solutions might be.

Thanks a lot for your patience during this tough time!

   Guillaume

[1] https://query.wikidata.org/

[2] https://grafana.wikimedia.org/d/000000489/wikidata-query-service?orgId=1&from=1571131796906&to=1573723796906&var-cluster_name=wdqs&panelId=8&fullscreen

[3] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238229

[4] https://blazegraph.com/

[5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T212826

[6] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T238045

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