On 10/12/10 07:36, KIZU Naoko wrote: I removed it, the decision was supported by Mark and Domas. Although it was very cool, serving a 65KB page as an error message was having some unintended consequences: * Every time there was a outage on the backend, our outgoing traffic would approximately triple, because the error page was so much larger than the average response size. The high outgoing bandwidth sometimes caused further overloads. This was the situation we were in when we decided to reduce the error message size. * The jump in traffic when the site was down or slow was making it difficult to interpret the traffic graphs. Normally, we would expect a lack of service to correspond to a drop in traffic. * If someone is sending us requests at an excessively high request rate, it would probably be cheaper for us to just process the requests than to serve a 65KB "access denied" message for every request. * The large error message was inconvenient for people using Wikimedia websites from clients other than modern web browsers, for instance command-line utilities that write the error message to the terminal. In principle, it would be possible to have a short error message with a <script> tag that loads the multilingual error messages. However, the server that serves the script would have to be very robust in order to have a reasonable chance of staying up during downtime. We didn't think it was appropriate to spend a large amount of time setting up such a server, just for this feature. -- Tim Starling