[Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki partially stopped working (Solution)

[Agon S. Buchholz]

Agon S. Buchholz wrote:

[ Strange phenomena like: Creating new articles and searching for
existing ones causes "deadlocks" without browser timouts or error
messages, new articles can only created, if even, by entering the
article's name directly in the browser's location bar etc. ]

To close this thread finally, just one closing remark. I'm pretty sure
that I've found out what was causing this strange behaviour: It seemed
to be caused by an overflowed Job queue. When I checked
[[Special:Statistics]], it showed numbers in the range of several
hundred thousand jobs, at one site even close to 1,5 mio. jobs.

Even if I don't fully understand what these jobs are, they are related
to templates; I'm making heavy use of templates, every article uses at
least one, and thus even changing just a couple of templates, embedded
in a few hundred pages, seems to multiply this job queue considerably.
At least that's what [1] suggestes: "Why the job queue exists: Updating
links tables when a template changes".

Thus I ran ./maintenance/runJobs.php for a few days (getting rid of this
Jobs definitely takes a lot of time), and now the Job queue is down to
1, and the problems have disappeared completely.

Just for the record: If your MediaWiki doesn't answer as quickly as you
are used to, or creating new articles seems to "deadlock", you might
want to have a look at the size of your Job queue, especially if you're
using lot's of templates.

Regards, -asb


[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Job_queue