On 11/24/07, Minh Nguyen <mxn(a)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.