On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:12:46 -0400, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
Method: Keep open a browser window in Firefox with two tabs, one pointing to the En WP the other the Fr WP. Refresh both tabs at the same time, wait to see which finishes loading first.
Results:
French Wikipedia wins: 11 times English Wikipedia wins: 5 times Tie: 5 times
I'd run a script to test this but I don't want to hit the server that much. Before I started keeping track I'd run another dozen or two tests and the French Wikipedia won most of them.
I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue, but not just cached ordering of the list. I'm not sure how the browser decides to do lookups that are made basically at the same time, but if it's alphabetical then the French Wikipedia might always get the IP after the English Wikipedia IP during the rotation.
So if the speed of the servers happens to decrease roughly in order of IP (so that .235 is slightly faster than .236, which is slightly faster than .245, etc.) then the French Wikipedia would only get assigned the faster IP one things loop back around from .248 back to .235 again. Things don't seem quite that bad, but if anything like that pattern holds then this might explain the differences in speed.
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
-Bill Clark