Fred Bauder wrote: Hi Fred, I'm not a Wikipedia coder, I mostly contribute articles. Wearing my contributor hat, I've been really irritated by the disastrous performance in the last couple of months. My style of editing is pointillistic, with lots of tiny edits, even breaking down large articles into a series of smaller commits. I can understand that the poor performance will have discouraged many people. Having said that, I am helping test the new system at the moment, and I can say that the coders are putting a lot of effort into making the system fast and smooth. I think they've taken the right decision, to give up on maintaining the old system, and work instead on getting the new system up and running really well before putting it into service ASAP. That means testing it really hard before going live. Here's a progress report. The new server is a dual-Athlon multiprocessor SMP machine with 2G of RAM, and an ext3 journalling filesystem. At the moment, the new server is running a hugely expanded database containing over 80,000 'articles', making a total of over 100,000 entries in the database. This consists of a snapshot of the entire Wikipedia, together with about 50,000 machine-generated articles. It's serving around 1.2 articles per second under as realistic a traffic load as we can generate using lots of bots running on external servers - the traffic is nice and bursty, and the system is regualrly peaking at 12 articles/second or more. 77% of pages are served in less than a second: what I'd consider to be 'instant' 89% of pages are served in less than 2 seconds: what I'd consider to be 'quick' 98% of pages are served in less than 5 seconds, about the start of the threshold of irritation 99.3% of pages are served in less than 10 seconds, a significant delay Only 0.1% of articles take longer than 20 seconds to serve: what I would regard as failures. About 30% of these are very big special pages. I'm trying to do a finer analysis of the rest, and find the exact conditions that seem to trigger the hiccups. What this means, I hope, is that when the new server comes into service it will perform really well under normal loads, and editing will be smooth and lovely again. Neil

On Sun, 14 Jul 2002, Stephen Gilbert wrote: The performance problem is a very serious issue, an emergency. I don't know if it's been done already, but the front page should have a prominent notice about what the problem is, and what's being done about it. Has this been done already? The performance problem prevents me from actually checking... :) Anyway, such a notice would put a lot of contributers at ease I expect. That _something is being done_ is a very good feeling, almost as good as having it work. -- Daniel

--- Lars Aronsson <lars(a)aronsson.se> wrote: Correct. That's why the old script has been abandoned and re-written. Here's a quick Wikipedia software history for the curious (if there are any errors, please correct them...). When we were still using UseModWiki, there was a general agreement to move to a SQL-based system, but there wasn't a satisfactory option available. Magnus was the only one willing to give it a go, and so he put together the PHP/MySQL combo we're currently using. I believe Magnus is a biologist who does some coding, not a software engineer; his code worked but was not "engineered", so to speak. After the script was deployed, various developers stepped in to help develop the software. However, there were too many performance problems, and so Lee Danial Crocker took up the challenge and redesigned the whole thing. The new server running the new code will replace our current setup as soon as it is ready. -- Stephen Gilbert __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Autos - Get free new car price quotes http://autos.yahoo.com

Darn, I was just going to say that the wikipedia performance seems to have improved again... last night I was able to keep on working on entries until I went to bed, when usually it starts timing out at around 7pm. However, it's just become non-responsive again at midday :( I can't wait for the new version to be installed... hope that it works a LOT better! -- Karen AKA Kajikit You can take the dragon out of Alfandra, but you can never take Alfandra out of the dragon (or the Kitty)... Come and visit my part of the web: Kajikit's Corner: http://Kajikit.netfirms.com/ Aussie Support Mailing List: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AussieSupport Allergyfree Eating Recipe Swap: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Allergyfree_Eating Love and huggles to all!