Tim Starling wrote: Well, excuse me for living and all, I did remember that, but between the fact I wasn't sure it wasn't just me, and the fact I was too hosed by an impossibly slow net connection to feel up to doing battle with my crappy IRC client, I chose not to. Anyway, this time, the problem isn't over; it still seems to be happening two days later. Numerous people are complaining; see e.g. the threads "Duplicate questions" and "Snail Pace" at [[Wikipedia talk:Reference desk]]. It's acting like either network congestion or db write contention, but those are just hunches from an uninformed bystander. Besides the extreme slowness, however, I do notice lots of those differently-formatted "The Wikimedia Foundation servers are currently experiencing technical difficulties" pages, and they seem to happen mostly when submitting a large edit, i.e. a page (as opposed to section) edit of a large page. I'm wondering if perhaps network lag is causing the time for the edited text to be submitted, plus the time it takes for the submitted text to be rerendered and sprayed back out, to now routinely exceed some threshold. (I also notice that, despite the error messages, the edits tend to succeed.) (And yes, I did bring some of this up on IRC tonight, a little while ago, but didn't get any answers. Obviously it's not the best place for long speculative explanations like this, either.)

Jay Ashworth wrote Thanks. I just don't know what's going on. Several of my problems have gone away and were almost certainly network-related. But every single time my bot or I try to edit all of one of our big Reference Desk pages, we get a Foundation server error. And I keep seeing other people complaining, too, so I don't think it's just me. If anyone else wants to test this, make an innocuous page (not section) edit to [[WP:RD/S]], [[WP:RD/H]], or [[WP:RD/M]], and see if you get the server error, too.

On 10/25/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: Yes, those load bog-slowly. I tested WP:RD/S. If I leave in the header, but remove the archives, it loads in 40191 ms on preview according to Tamper Data. With the archives but not the header, it's just 6766 ms. Without either, it's 5836 ms. With both, it's 49430 ms. I think the conclusion is clear: the header adds over 30 seconds to the page load time. It needs to be killed, stone-dead. This is the sort of thing that the wikitext include limit was supposed to prevent -- it seems not to be doing its job.

On 10/25/07, Steve Summit <scs(a)eskimo.com> wrote: It's possible that there's somewhere or other we're doing a scan of the history of an article, but I'm aware of no such place, personally. It certainly wouldn't affect page rendering.

On 10/25/07, Platonides <Platonides(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, that's a good example. I took the other tack: I copied [[George W. Bush]] to a user subpage and pointed out that it was just as slow there. Ah, of course, there is a problem there.

On 10/25/07, Simetrical <Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote: We need a Lord of the Templates who has authority to terminate these with extreme prejudice. I nominate you. :-) -- Toward Peace, Love & Progress: Erik DISCLAIMER: This message does not represent an official position of the Wikimedia Foundation or its Board of Trustees.