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? At the time, wikt:vi: was still in its infancy, but it's much larger now -- 13th in article size [2]. The idea of a free, community-edited Vietnamese translationary is pretty popular now, and we compete against at least two large projects, not to mention the scores of sites mirroring the same dictionary we imported into our wiki last year. These other projects are all hosted in Vietnam, close to the majority of their users, so speed is a real issue for wikt:vi:. It's what seems to keep many people from using the site on a regular basis.
Users have complained that accessing Wiktionary from Vietnam is pretty slow, and I believe them because it takes relatively forever for me to load some major Vietnamese sites (and I'm on a very fast university connection). If Wikimedia still hosts or mirrors any wikis on yaseo, would it be possible to do the same for wikt:vi:?
[1] In Vietnamese: http://vi.wiktionary.org/wiki/Th%E1%BA%A3o_lu%E1%BA%ADn_Th%C3%A0nh_vi%C3%AAn... [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Table_of_Wikimedia_Projects_by_Size
Minh Nguyen wrote:
If Wikimedia still hosts or mirrors any wikis on yaseo, would it be possible to do the same for wikt:vi:?
"yaseo wikis" are now hosted at tampa. There's a squid cluster in yaseo. Theoretically, they could be moved again, but it has its drawbacks (no commons, extra complexity for administration, SUL has to take that into account, like stewards extension needed...).
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.
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