Anthere reports that there is a general impression among the French that en.wikipedia.org loads faster than fr.wikipedia.org. Is this possible?
Can we run some tests?
----- Forwarded message from Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com -----
From: Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com Date: Thu, 15 Jul 2004 20:44:24 +0200 To: wikien-l@Wikipedia.org Subject: [WikiEN-l] Re: Fork risk (was Re: Google ads)
I can just say one thing I saw myself, and which was mentionned by several french people.
When I have several windows open at the same moment, say three
*one open on en *one open on fr *one open on www.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main Page
The first page to load in en. Several seconds later, it is fr. And much later wikimedia.
I cant avoid seeing that en pages are often served much quicker than fr pages. I know not why. I am sure it is not on purpose. But it is a fact.
Thomas R. Koll wrote:
On Thu, Jul 15, 2004 at 08:41:55PM +1000, Tim Starling wrote:
If a Wikimedia chapter wants to buy servers for their language wiki to avoid slow, poor-quality service or site-wide advertising, then we should give them our blessing.
I'd prefer read-only mirrors which redirect the edits to the main server. I don't know the situation at fr: but at de: we use wikipedia.de not de.wikipedia.org in press news, so it would be easy to take some good portion of the traffic off the Florida-servers.
ciao, tom
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----- End forwarded message -----
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 11:54:16 -0700, Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales jwales@wikia.com 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?
Can we run some tests?
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
I suspect this is at least partly just an instance of selective observation. For some people, one site probably loads slightly faster than the other for whatever random routing reason. Those who see the French site load first aren't going to complain, but those who see the English site load first _will_ complain. Hence, you only hear one side of what's really a two-sided issue.
Or at least that's my guess.
It could also be something about the round-robin DNS:
root@xoom:~>host en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246 root@xoom:~>host fr.wikipedia.org fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
Some browsers will choose an IP at random, but others take the first in the list. Maybe it's just that .246 is faster than .247 and some people's DNS servers have the order cached that way so the same IP is always returned first.
-Bill Clark
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:12:46 -0400, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
Method: Keep open a browser window in Firefox with two tabs, one pointing to the En WP the other the Fr WP. Refresh both tabs at the same time, wait to see which finishes loading first.
Results:
French Wikipedia wins: 11 times English Wikipedia wins: 5 times Tie: 5 times
I'd run a script to test this but I don't want to hit the server that much. Before I started keeping track I'd run another dozen or two tests and the French Wikipedia won most of them.
I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue, but not just cached ordering of the list. I'm not sure how the browser decides to do lookups that are made basically at the same time, but if it's alphabetical then the French Wikipedia might always get the IP after the English Wikipedia IP during the rotation.
So if the speed of the servers happens to decrease roughly in order of IP (so that .235 is slightly faster than .236, which is slightly faster than .245, etc.) then the French Wikipedia would only get assigned the faster IP one things loop back around from .248 back to .235 again. Things don't seem quite that bad, but if anything like that pattern holds then this might explain the differences in speed.
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
-Bill Clark
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
(In which case the fact that the French Wikipedia is faster for me would just be an anomaly, obviously.)
-Bill
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 15:50:49 -0400, Bill Clark wclarkxoom@gmail.com wrote:
I still think it might be a round-robin DNS issue,
I'd bet dollars to donuts that it's at least in part due to DNS. Hard-coding different values into my hosts file allows me to more consistently control which site loads first. (Note: If you do this, make sure to pick pages to compare that have the same number of images, since using just one IP address significantly slows down the loading of the page as your browser will no longer request files in parallel.)
I don't have the time to try all 6x6 combinations right now (running out the door) but it really does seem that picking and choosing which IP address to use for each domain makes a very significant difference.
I'm not sure why some servers would be consistently slower than others, but perhaps some DNS resolvers choose the highest/lowest address in a list rather than the first/last/random one, and that could bias things quite a bit.
Also, it might simply be better squid caching for the English site due to the fact that it gets far more traffic.
It's probably both. I was testing the homepage on each site earlier, which was probably the stupidest page for me to test since it's obviously going to be cached. When comparing some random page on the French and English sites, it's far more likely that the English one will be cached.
-Bill Clark
The French Wikipedia loads several seconds faster for me.
I suspect this is at least partly just an instance of selective observation. For some people, one site probably loads slightly faster than the other for whatever random routing reason. Those who see the French site load first aren't going to complain, but those who see the English site load first _will_ complain. Hence, you only hear one side of what's really a two-sided issue.
Or at least that's my guess.
It could also be something about the round-robin DNS:
root@xoom:~>host en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245 en.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246 root@xoom:~>host fr.wikipedia.org fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.246 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.247 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.248 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.235 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.236 fr.wikipedia.org has address 207.142.131.245
Some browsers will choose an IP at random, but others take the first in the list. Maybe it's just that .246 is faster than .247 and some people's DNS servers have the order cached that way so the same IP is always returned first.
-Bill Clark
I was not precise enough. This feeling was quite strong about 3 or 4 weeks ago (or more ? time goes so quickly :-)). This was a time where fr.wikipedia was nearly stuck every day around 7pm-9pm. When I say "stuck", I really mean """stuck""". At that time, I could go on editing en or meta, it was very slow, but was definitly faster than fr.
Shai told me that the configuration a few weeks ago was different from what it is right now. In any cases, this slowliness is not the case any more. But I personally have no idea of config changes, so had no idea it was different a while ago. I think that the one-side or two-sided issue is not really relevant.
If you ask me, each time I go to the www.wikimedia.org (now about a week old), it is horribly slow to load pages. To the point that in spite of my wish to work on this website, I have hardly done anything on it yet because I do not have the patience to wait 10 to 20 seconds for a page to load or save.
I know not what is the problem. I just loaded the main page. The source writes <!-- Served by isidore.wikimedia.org in 0.20 secs. -->
Still the page took exactly 21 seconds to load.
Why ????
This is not "cultural" effect, this is just what I see.
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?
Can we run some tests?
Each time I start my computer and I open my browser I load 10 pages at the same time: my user page on fr, my watch list on fr, two related pages from fr, 3 normal pages from fr and a page from en: [[List of astronomical topics]]. Since several weeks, systematically, the pag efrom en load substantially faster than the fr ones (the second page is my user page on fr, then all the remaining one more or less at the same time).
It can be that this speed difference is due to the simultaneous loading of 3 "heavy" pages on fr while the only from en is not so demanding. Otherwise, I don't feel a great subjective difference of loading time between fr and en (but I have the impression that pages from en: loads a little bit faster, while the ones from meta load a little bit slower).
-- Looxix
On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 22:35:36 +0200, Luc Van Oostenryck luc.vanoostenryck@easynet.be wrote:
It can be that this speed difference is due to the simultaneous loading of 3 "heavy" pages on fr while the only from en is not so demanding.
Also, most browsers will only open a certain number of connections per server. If you are loading many pages from fr, especially if those pages contain images (likely) then you may simply have to wait for the first set of fr: material to load before a connection is free and a second set can load.
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)
I did a profiling run of fr versus en, at:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Profiling/En_versus_fr
Note that the total times are skewed by a single slow query recorded on fr. The specific functions provide a better comparison.
Brion Vibber wrote:
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.)
The second language file would show up in Setup.php-language, and indeed it does: 2.05ms for en versus 27ms for fr. I think the ucfirst function would show up in Title::secureAndSplit(): 790us each for fr versus 250us for en. However that's not a very big effect, and in fact the overall Article::view() time for fr is faster than that for en: 146ms versus 110ms. I'm not sure exactly where that discrepancy comes from. This was taken in an off-peak period.
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.
It's important that we serve the non-en wikis consistently faster than en, and I'd welcome any technical suggestions on how to do this. This is because when fr is faster than en, it's because developers only care about en and the other languages are just along for the ride. Never mind the fact that 11 out of the 17 people with shell access are from Europe, as are almost all of the regular CVS committers. When fr is faster than en, it's because en is bigger than fr and therefore harder to serve.
Perhaps this would do the trick:
if ( $wgLanguageCode == "en" ) { sleep(1); }
-- Tim Starling
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