Jonathan Walther wrote:
Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia. Now I can't access the pages at all. Is Lir doing something nasty in the way of big queries? Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this? My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.
Lir can't run queries, and neither can you, Jonathan. Only users with "sysop" privileges can run queries.
None of the queries I've run have taken longer than a few seconds to return, even though some of this cross-linked between 2 or more tables -- so I don't think dramatic slowdowns are being caused by ad hoc queries.
Brion or someone eles explained a few days ago about how MySQL makes one query wait for another. I suspect that these forced waits tend to "cascade", if you know what that means.
Ed Poor