On 7 June, 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time (9:00AM Paris/Berlin time) we will be moving the bulk of the servers to a new facility across the street.
I assume we will try to set up a sensible "downtime" page on the paris squids or something. But the site will absolutely be down for awhile.
The colocation facility is providing staff to do the move, and we are also supplying myself, Chad, Terry, and possibly Michael Davis and possibly a friend of Chad's -- all to make this go as quickly as possible.
--Jimbo
What I wonder is, in moves like this, why are they all moved at the same time? Why not move half, and then after we get _those_ up and running again move the other half?
Mark
On 04/06/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
On 7 June, 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time (9:00AM Paris/Berlin time) we will be moving the bulk of the servers to a new facility across the street.
I assume we will try to set up a sensible "downtime" page on the paris squids or something. But the site will absolutely be down for awhile.
The colocation facility is providing staff to do the move, and we are also supplying myself, Chad, Terry, and possibly Michael Davis and possibly a friend of Chad's -- all to make this go as quickly as possible.
--Jimbo
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
On 6/4/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
What I wonder is, in moves like this, why are they all moved at the same time? Why not move half, and then after we get _those_ up and running again move the other half?
You can't make a subnet appear in multiple places without ugly hackery and an extra network connection (tunnels, perhaps address translation, maybe origami routing).
So unless you're also renumbering (which has it's own outage causing issues) most places are pretty much stuck.
All of this says that while you can avoid downtime it's usually costly and complex, and if there are problems they often cause more downtime then you would have had without the the extra measures.
Gregory Maxwell wrote:
On 6/4/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
What I wonder is, in moves like this, why are they all moved at the same time? Why not move half, and then after we get _those_ up and running again move the other half?
You can't make a subnet appear in multiple places without ugly hackery and an extra network connection (tunnels, perhaps address translation, maybe origami routing).
I think Mark was envisaging a process where you move half of the servers and set them up, then flip a switch so that from now on, the public will be accessing the servers in the new location and no longer the old. Then you extend the new location with the remaining half of the hardware. You would never need to have two places function at the same time.
Timwi
Mark Williamson wrote:
What I wonder is, in moves like this, why are they all moved at the same time? Why not move half, and then after we get _those_ up and running again move the other half?
Well, this involves other difficulties and complexities and potentially much more extended downtime. (And potentially, no actual downtime but a period of extreme slowness.)
It was a difficult decision as to which to do, but I chose the "fast move all at once option" after a consideration of time and resources and difficulty on the volunteer admins.
In this case, all the volunteer admins need to do is be around when we bring things back up. Ideally, nothing should need to be done -- the machines will all be unchanged in configuration, our ip numbers will be routed to the new cage, everything should be identical.
Of course, nothing like this is ever ideal, and we should expect catastrophe.
--Jimbo
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
I also recommend making any downtime error page generated multilingual, by consulting the people in the other language IRC channels. If I wasn't studying for exams I'd do that myself.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
On 7 June, 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time (9:00AM Paris/Berlin time) we will be moving the bulk of the servers to a new facility across the street.
I assume we will try to set up a sensible "downtime" page on the paris squids or something. But the site will absolutely be down for awhile.
The colocation facility is providing staff to do the move, and we are also supplying myself, Chad, Terry, and possibly Michael Davis and possibly a friend of Chad's -- all to make this go as quickly as possible.
--Jimbo
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Hehehe... :)
I also recommend making any downtime error page generated multilingual, by consulting the people in the other language IRC channels. If I wasn't studying for exams I'd do that myself.
Here's a preview of the downtime page Kate's been throwing together: http://fuchsia.knams.wikimedia.org/
If you've got additional translations, please e-mail them to me directly or pop in at #wikimedia-tech on irc.freenode.net; the mailing lists will probably be down during the downtime.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Hi, if you are going to do that (multilingual downtime page), just give me the text in English and you'll have German and Italian back asap. Furthermore I'd send the translation request to translators-l@wikimedia.org.
Ciao, Sabine
ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
I also recommend making any downtime error page generated multilingual, by consulting the people in the other language IRC channels. If I wasn't studying for exams I'd do that myself.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/4/05, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
On 7 June, 2005 at 3:00AM Eastern Standard Time (9:00AM Paris/Berlin time) we will be moving the bulk of the servers to a new facility across the street.
I assume we will try to set up a sensible "downtime" page on the paris squids or something. But the site will absolutely be down for awhile.
The colocation facility is providing staff to do the move, and we are also supplying myself, Chad, Terry, and possibly Michael Davis and possibly a friend of Chad's -- all to make this go as quickly as possible.
--Jimbo
___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Well, your wishes were obeyed. The Paris squids showed to everyone accessing wikipedia, that we again had a crash, were trying to fix it, and would be back soon.
It was not a maintenance page which was shown, but a crash page. Not sure it is exactly good for our image.
Ant
Sorry I couldn't actually throw together the multilingual page, but I was studying for exams and will be for the next couple of weeks. But once that's finished, I want to get back on track and complete putting together multilingual server error messages. I don't think it's acceptable on a site as multilingual as Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects too) to only give English language error messages. I was hoping to get some help scripting a page with mechanics similar to the Wikipedia preferences page, whereby clicking a link changes the content, but where the content still displays correctly on older browsers. I started doing this about a month ago, but other things got in the way. We would have to decide which languages to include. In my semi-working prototype, I included only the top 5 languages, which I think were English, French, German, Swedish and Japanese. If we include too many languages, we run a risk of placing extra strain on the servers because the file size will inflate. Anyway, tell me what you think of my idea.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/8/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Well, your wishes were obeyed. The Paris squids showed to everyone accessing wikipedia, that we again had a crash, were trying to fix it, and would be back soon.
It was not a maintenance page which was shown, but a crash page. Not sure it is exactly good for our image.
Ant
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi Mark,
I'm assuming your "top 5" is based on article count.
I don't think that's right in this context, as it will be the visitors who see the error page - the articles aren't the ones looking at the error page, after all!
That would be, in order, English - Japanese - German - Spanish - French.
That top 5 would cover 80% of our visitors. (the top 3 would cover 70%, just English covers 40%)
Unfortunately (but for this purpose, fortunately), if you look at the graph of cumulative %age of visitors/day by rank in visitors/day, the curve is very very steep.
That means that with just a few languages, you can cover almost all visitors.
11 languages will cover 93%. In order: English - Japanese - German - Spanish - French - Polish - Dutch - Swedish - Chinese - Italian - Portuguese.
That also says a lot about us: most of these are languages which originate in Western Europe, the only exceptions being Japanese, Chinese, and Polish.
14 languages will cover 95%; just add Hebrew - Danish - Finnish to the end. (again, in that order)
You could try to unify the Scandinavian versions of the message (Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian), if you want to I can help with that.
23 languages will cover 97%, add Esperanto - Norwegian - Russian - Arabic - Slovene - Catalan - Malaysian - Korean - Romanian.
As you can see, the more languages you add the less quickly it approaches 100%.
So it really all depends on what ratio of server load to number of people who can read/understand it in their language you think is best...
My personal opinion is that the 11 languages is the best option.
It might also be a good idea to have a shorter message for the lower languages in the list.
Mark
On 07/06/05, ultrablue@gmail.com ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
Sorry I couldn't actually throw together the multilingual page, but I was studying for exams and will be for the next couple of weeks. But once that's finished, I want to get back on track and complete putting together multilingual server error messages. I don't think it's acceptable on a site as multilingual as Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects too) to only give English language error messages. I was hoping to get some help scripting a page with mechanics similar to the Wikipedia preferences page, whereby clicking a link changes the content, but where the content still displays correctly on older browsers. I started doing this about a month ago, but other things got in the way. We would have to decide which languages to include. In my semi-working prototype, I included only the top 5 languages, which I think were English, French, German, Swedish and Japanese. If we include too many languages, we run a risk of placing extra strain on the servers because the file size will inflate. Anyway, tell me what you think of my idea.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/8/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Well, your wishes were obeyed. The Paris squids showed to everyone accessing wikipedia, that we again had a crash, were trying to fix it, and would be back soon.
It was not a maintenance page which was shown, but a crash page. Not sure it is exactly good for our image.
Ant
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
Hi,
Why not include all languages that would translate the error message? Is it really that much of a performance hog?
Could also maybe a rewrite role be applied for example when someone tries to reach
sk.wikipedia.org he would get sk.wikipedia.org/?lang=sk and so on for other langs with fall back to en
just a thought
In response to the first part:
Yes, it is that much of a performance hog. Just a little bit of text isn't that bad, but when you multiply it times hundreds of thousands of visitors, it gets to be significant.
In response to the second part: I would imagine that this sort of thing would take up more bandwidth as well.
However I don't know how much bandwidth either would take up - it may not be too much.
Mark
On 08/06/05, Pavol Cupka pavol.cupka@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Why not include all languages that would translate the error message? Is it really that much of a performance hog?
Could also maybe a rewrite role be applied for example when someone tries to reach
sk.wikipedia.org he would get sk.wikipedia.org/?lang=sk and so on for other langs with fall back to en
just a thought
-- Palica http://sk.wikipedia.org/User:Palica Nezabudni si vziať svoje Wikamíny. / Don't forget to take your Wikamins today. - Palica http://sk.wikipedia.org - slobodná encyklopédia, ktorú môže každý upravovať - AJ TY
Hoi, We have servers in more than one location. I think I recall that the messages were served from Amsterdam. There is ample capacity to host this data from there so we can have multiple languages and we can cache these as well. Basically it is a non-issue. Thanks, GerardM
Mark Williamson wrote:
In response to the first part:
Yes, it is that much of a performance hog. Just a little bit of text isn't that bad, but when you multiply it times hundreds of thousands of visitors, it gets to be significant.
In response to the second part: I would imagine that this sort of thing would take up more bandwidth as well.
However I don't know how much bandwidth either would take up - it may not be too much.
Mark
On 08/06/05, Pavol Cupka pavol.cupka@gmail.com wrote:
Hi,
Why not include all languages that would translate the error message? Is it really that much of a performance hog?
Could also maybe a rewrite role be applied for example when someone tries to reach
sk.wikipedia.org he would get sk.wikipedia.org/?lang=sk and so on for other langs with fall back to en
just a thought
-- Palica http://sk.wikipedia.org/User:Palica Nezabudni si vziať svoje Wikamíny. / Don't forget to take your Wikamins today. - Palica http://sk.wikipedia.org - slobodná encyklopédia, ktorú môže každý upravovať - AJ TY
Mark Williamson wrote:
Yes, it is that much of a performance hog.
This is so obviously not true. We're talking about a small set of static HTML pages here. For 100 languages, that's 100 pages. Most people will look at no more than 2 of them. Millions of websites have more pages than that, visitors that surf through them more, and run from a single server without a performance problem.
Timwi
Mark Williamson ti 8/6 sia-kong:
However I don't know how much bandwidth either would take up - it may not be too much.
Also, I (and Mark) had pictured it differently (or so I presume - we may have the same name but that doesn't mean I can speak for Mark) - one page for everybody rather than multiple pages being based on accept languages.
Host language is a better idea, I think, and we really should look into it because many peoples' computers are set with, say, English as the accept language but would prefer to see the message in, say, Chinese.
Mark
On 08/06/05, Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
Mark Williamson wrote:
Yes, it is that much of a performance hog.
This is so obviously not true. We're talking about a small set of static HTML pages here. For 100 languages, that's 100 pages. Most people will look at no more than 2 of them. Millions of websites have more pages than that, visitors that surf through them more, and run from a single server without a performance problem.
Timwi
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
That's true, I had envisaged the one (rather bulky) HTML page containing all the different languages' error messages, and people could switch the language of the error message by clicking the desired language's name. I didn't think we'd be able to get different error pages for the different language wikis, since every single Wikimedia site gets served the same error message at the moment. But if it's technically possible to do this then it would be much better.
We could do a combination of both: have the host language show up as the central/main language on the error page, but also have the top 5/10/... languages hidden in the HTML so the user can switch to that language error message if necessary. Or just English, if people feel that's an adequate secondary error message for non-English language wikis.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/9/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Also, I (and Mark) had pictured it differently (or so I presume - we may have the same name but that doesn't mean I can speak for Mark) - one page for everybody rather than multiple pages being based on accept languages.
Host language is a better idea, I think, and we really should look into it because many peoples' computers are set with, say, English as the accept language but would prefer to see the message in, say, Chinese.
Mark
I don't see why we would need any error message other than that in the language of the specific Wiki - why would anybody requesting a page on ca: need to see the message in English, or Spanish, or German?
For languages where we can't get a translation, it should be based on the language. Arabic is not in the top 5, but for a language like Somali chances are anybody requesting a page there would be able to read Arabic.
Mark
On 08/06/05, ultrablue@gmail.com ultrablue@gmail.com wrote:
That's true, I had envisaged the one (rather bulky) HTML page containing all the different languages' error messages, and people could switch the language of the error message by clicking the desired language's name. I didn't think we'd be able to get different error pages for the different language wikis, since every single Wikimedia site gets served the same error message at the moment. But if it's technically possible to do this then it would be much better.
We could do a combination of both: have the host language show up as the central/main language on the error page, but also have the top 5/10/... languages hidden in the HTML so the user can switch to that language error message if necessary. Or just English, if people feel that's an adequate secondary error message for non-English language wikis.
~Mark Ryan
On 6/9/05, Mark Williamson node.ue@gmail.com wrote:
Also, I (and Mark) had pictured it differently (or so I presume - we may have the same name but that doesn't mean I can speak for Mark) - one page for everybody rather than multiple pages being based on accept languages.
Host language is a better idea, I think, and we really should look into it because many peoples' computers are set with, say, English as the accept language but would prefer to see the message in, say, Chinese.
Mark
Pavol Cupka wrote in gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.misc:
Hi,
Why not include all languages that would translate the error message? Is it really that much of a performance hog?
for something as trivial as the downtime page, which is mostly static content with some translated strings, i don't think it should be a problem. yesterday, we served the downtime page for every wiki from a single server (dual 2.2GHz Opteron) with about 15% CPU load.
Could also maybe a rewrite role be applied for example when someone tries to reach
sk.wikipedia.org he would get sk.wikipedia.org/?lang=sk and so on for other langs with fall back to en
currently it uses the Accept-Language to decide what language to serve. if that isn't specified, or is "en", it should be possible to use the Host header to decide the language... i'll have a look at implementing that.
kate.
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Sorry I couldn't actually throw together the multilingual page, but I was studying for exams and will be for the next couple of weeks.
Hi
Do not worry. Exams are more important.
But
once that's finished, I want to get back on track and complete putting together multilingual server error messages. I don't think it's acceptable on a site as multilingual as Wikipedia (and the other Wikimedia projects too) to only give English language error messages. I was hoping to get some help scripting a page with mechanics similar to the Wikipedia preferences page, whereby clicking a link changes the content, but where the content still displays correctly on older browsers. I started doing this about a month ago, but other things got in the way. We would have to decide which languages to include. In my semi-working prototype, I included only the top 5 languages, which I think were English, French, German, Swedish and Japanese. If we include too many languages, we run a risk of placing extra strain on the servers because the file size will inflate. Anyway, tell me what you think of my idea.
Sounds good. I cant judge myself on the extra strain, but the more languages we can cover the better. Note that this is as much a technical issue than a translation issue :-)
But thanks a lot for doing this Mark. It will be much appreciated.
Ant
~Mark Ryan
On 6/8/05, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
ultrablue@gmail.com a écrit:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't this mean you're shifting the servers across the street at 3AM? That's got to look suspicious :-)
If you're setting up a downtime page on the Paris squids, I recommend not including a link to Openfacts.berlios.de. Every time Wikipedia has even a mild downtime (i.e. about 3 minutes or less) that site gets overwhelmed and goes down itself. I don't think it's fair on whoever owns that site.
Well, your wishes were obeyed. The Paris squids showed to everyone accessing wikipedia, that we again had a crash, were trying to fix it, and would be back soon.
It was not a maintenance page which was shown, but a crash page. Not sure it is exactly good for our image.
Ant
Wikipedia-l mailing list Wikipedia-l@Wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikipedia-l
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