On 11/24/07, Minh Nguyen mxn@zoomtown.com wrote:
As the lone active administrator at the Vietnamese Wiktionary, I've received several questions from regular users about the wiki's slowness. [1] Part of me wants to tell of the days long ago when Wikipedia used to go offline for days on end due to demand.
Anyhow, I vaguely recall that, at one point, several Asian-language wikis were being hosted or mirrored at the yaseo cluster in South Korea. Is that still the case? . . . These other projects are all hosted in Vietnam, close to the majority of their users, so speed is a real issue for wikt:vi:.
I'm not a sysadmin, but basically, there are Squids in Seoul, and these should serve a large majority of visits by anonymous users to the Vietnamese Wikipedia. You might notice that if you log out, viewing commonly-visited pages like the main page becomes noticeably faster. These page views (the Squid-cached ones) should be as fast as any competing sites, if not faster. Views that miss the local Squid cache need to go to Tampa, which will add a substantial fraction of a second. Of course, even the distance between Vietnam and Korea might add as much as a tenth of a second to page load time (~18 ms roundtrip at the speed of light between Hanoi and Seoul).
But I suspect the larger lag is probably due to the fact that MediaWiki is likely to be slower than, for instance, mirrors that only need to maintain static content, or mirrors that serve much smaller audiences. Many American users complain of slowness too, and living in New York, I can testify that Wikipedia is not infrequently noticeably slower than mirror sites. It's not something specific to places far away from America.