[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia scheduled downtime tonight

[Brion Vibber]

The English-language Wikipedia will be in _read-only mode_ for a few
hours tonight (Feb 9->Feb 10) while the database structure is altered to
eliminate some of the remaining performance drags before the heavy
weekday traffic gets into full swing.

This will also fix the out-of-order page history bug, which was caused
by a temporary workaround to the slow history problem.

The downtime window will cover roughly 04:00-08:00 UTC (UK time). For us
USians, that's 8pm-midnight PST / 11pm-3am EST. Australians & others,
please check http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_zone for the appropriate
offset to your local time. (I'm not certain of the end time; it may run
shorter, and hopefully won't run longer. It's a big database, and mass
modifications take a *long* time.)

During that time the wiki should remain accessible for reading, but no
one will be able to log in or make edits.

I'll also be upgrading various other languages to the current software
revision; those should go relatively quickly, and will be staggered.
Generally, meta, wiktionary, and Wikipedia's other languages should
remain accessible for both reading and editing through the night except
for some brief read-only outages.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)


ps Tech note: I figure we should hold off on the mysql 4 upgrade until
they can release a version that isn't followed within a day by a dire
warning about a new bug that directly affects a type of query that we
use a lot for Wikipedia. :)

In the meantime, I'm adding the inverse timestamp column which can be
sorted on the index by mysql 3 (thus speeding and fixing bugs in
history, contribs, & recentchangeslinked), and a random queue index
column to replace the separate table and its insanely slow refilling
operation.

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