I often protect a page, before I undo damage to it.
Before reading this thread, my motivation for protecting a damaged page was just to keep the vandal (or newbie experimenter) from mangling the page further. But now I realize that, serendipitously, it also would stop non-sysops from wasting their time duplicating my work.
After I've protected and fixed a number of damaged pages, I then decide whether to label the person responsible a "vandal" or not. If I decide they're a vandal, I block their IP. Then I unprotect all the pages.
Ed Poor
Main changes:
* functions with optional parameter, like \sqrt[n] m vs. \sqrt m
* \mbox {foo}, now ASCII-only, but it will have to support Unicode in future.
Main changes:
* MD5 is stored in binary in database now, so MySQL has easier life
* Everything produced by renderMath is protected from further evaluation
Mechanism for doing that is ugly as hell (it's almost the same as one used
by <nowiki>)
* texvc is compiled to native code by default now. It probably won't make much
difference in terms of speed, as it's latex dvips and convert who take
most resources, but its free gaim, so why not use it (well, we could
also consider stripping texvc binary to make it a bit smaller, or doing some
really obscure optimalizations, but texvc is really not a performance
bottleneck).
Open questions:
* How to put TeX in safe mode ?
* Did you really measure that dir/a/ab/abcdef012345678.png is significantly
faster than dir/abcdef012345678.png and I should make math mode use this
trick too or you were just guessing and I can ignore that ?
Main changes:
* diff against newer version of CVS
* Failure message localized
* configurable temporary directory
* temporary file names prefixed by pid, so two texvc generating the same
image won't clash
Code is gradually getting closer to production quality.
Everything seems more or less normal now, but I'm going to leave
MaxClients down around 100 for a little while, just to see how it
goes. In an hour or two, if all is well, I'll set it back up to 150.
150 is the default, and generally not the best choice in my
experience. On Bomis, we usually set it much higher, but only after a
fair amount of experimenting with memory usage, etc. Possibly the 150
clients setting is a performance bottleneck on most days.
--Jimbo
Well, things seem sort of normal again now. There is no definitive
answer as to what was going on. It seems likely to have had something
to do with the apc cache.
Brion has a very safe looking script to clear the apc cache, I see
nothing wrong with running it. But it seemed "stuck", and the site
was very unhappy, and when he kill -9'd it, the site seemed better.
But at roughly the same time, he disabled apc caching completely,
which is probably a negative for performance to some extent.
So, we're running again, but I'm not at all confident that we understand
the problem.
I'm not getting any response from www.wikipedia.org and I'm guessing that something's wrong on the server.
Should I try to reboot it remotely, or what?
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Poor, Edmund W.
Sent: Tuesday, December 03, 2002 12:37 PM
To: 'wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org'
Subject: Say 'high' to a new sysop
Why don't we give Tokerboy (aka Tucci) sysop rights? I have developer rights, so if no one objects in the next few hours I'll just run the script.
We'll have a party with cake and some other more potent goodies later this evening... ;-)
Ed Poor
-----Original Message-----
From: Tucci [mailto:tucci528@yahoo.com]
Sent: Sunday, December 01, 2002 3:50 PM
To: wikien-l(a)wikipedia.org
Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: WikiEN-l digest, Vol 1 #25 - 9 msgs
> You forgot a vital piece of information. By which
> user name do you want sysop
> user rights? Tokerboy or Tucci528 (I assume Tokerboy
> since that is the user
> name you seem to be using these days).
Tokerboy, definitely. I only used Tucci528 before I
could think of anything better (I'm indecisive).
I was out of town for a few days, and I thought for
sure I'd have about a million digests waiting for me.
Turns out there were three, so I guess I'm not the
only one who was vacationing from wikipedia during Thanksgiving.