Right now I'm seeing that image downloads on wikimedia commons have slowed down by a factor of ten or so since the last weekend. I used to download about 700 images an hour, so it's possible that my bandwidth is being throttled, but it might be something affecting other people too.

Something I notice is that sometimes I can download a file very quickly:

[paul@haruhi ~]$ curl -O http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Barabinsk_station1.jpg % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 807k 100 807k 0 0 797k 0 0:00:01 0:00:01 --:--:-- 863k

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Then sometimes the download takes orders of magnitude longer:

[paul@haruhi ~]$ curl -O http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7b/Barabinsk_station1.jpg % Total % Received % Xferd Average Speed Time Time Time Current Dload Upload Total Spent Left Speed 100 807k 100 807k 0 0 16431 0 0:00:50 0:00:50 --:--:-- 14436

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I'm wondering if there's some specific problem here, if I'm being throttled, or if there's just a general need for more bandwidth & servers. In any case I'd be pretty happy to make a donation that would cover any operational costs that my activities incur and then some.