On Sun, 2003-04-06 at 08:27, Torsten Bronger wrote:
In this context I have a question: I have very often problems with the connection speed to Wikipedia, especially the time when the first bytes flow after a page request. Is this a problem on my side or is the Wikipedia server sometimes just swamped?
Actual data transfer should be very fast (try downloading the database dumps! :) but the initial connection may be slow, especially on the wiki itself. The wiki has to grab the page data from the database, render it into HTML, and only then can send you a web page, so there's an initial delay, which can be uncomfortably long if the db is highly loaded.
Sometimes the output buffering is such that it will send the very beginning of the page in one chunk, and then the rest of the page shortly thereafter; this could also result in seemingly slow transfer speeds.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)