On ven, 2003-01-24 at 15:28, Brion Vibber wrote:
Just a warning folks: later tonight I'll be taking Wikipedia offline for a bit for regular backups, and conversion to a different database table format which should better withstand the heavy peer pressure that a young wiki encounters as it discovers the wonder that is "a whole frigging lot of users".
Okay, www.wikipedia.org has been back online for about an hour and hasn't exploded yet, so I'm declaring it a success for now.
Page view counters have been re-enabled on the English wiki, and the special page blackout has returned to its previous half-day schedule. If it holds up well enough, we should be able to remove the blackout entirely, which I know will please certain Wikipedians. (Additionally, caching of results is planned so that access to Most Wanted and Orphans and whatnot will be lightning fast. But, that's not done yet. D'oh!)
If anyone encounters any exciting new database errors, or any oddness related to searching (particularly with pages that have been recently created, renamed, etc), please report it with as much detail as possible.
Users of the other wikis, you might want to take a look too, as you'll be converted next and will get the same bugs. ;)
Fresh backup dumps of all languages on phase III are available from: http://http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download
(Incidentally, this latest change should make future backup dumps smaller, as the generated search index fields are moved to a separate table.)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)