Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales wrote:
Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org. Is this possible?
fr might in fact be very slightly slower than en since it loads a second language file and the UTF-8 support functions & data. (This will be mostly eliminated once en converts to UTF-8 someday.)
However all speed is extremely variable on these wikis, and depends on the load of the servers, how much you've got cached, whether you're logged in, whether the page is cached in the parser cache, the complexity of the pages involved, whether there are templates, whether the templates are cached, whether you have new messages, whether there's a site message, whether your user data's cached, and the phase of the moon. The absolute speed difference will be *dwarfed* by the hit-to-hit variations.
-- brion vibber (brino @ pobox.com)