Wikipedia has become so slow as to be almost unusable at times for me in the last 10 days, both for reading and editing. Pages are taking minutes to load. There are problems saving edits - even when they appear to be saved, when I check they're not there (even though my name is in the edit history); and sometimes when they appear not to have been saved, when I check, they ARE there. As of the last hour or so, it won't save edits at all. We must be losing a lot of readers, and will start to lose editors. I know from my own experience of doing online research, that if a website takes even a few seconds longer to load than I expect it to, I move on, and when I see that website again, I don't even try it. So losing readers even once can mean losing them forever.
There's a page for discussion of this here http://openfacts.berlios.de/index-en.phtml?title=Wikipedia_Status, but it seems to be largely editors reporting their problems. Could one of the people who's working on the problem post an explanatory note on that page, or on the main page? There are a couple of notes from Tim from a few days ago, but they don't seem to explain why there has been such a significant change in the last 10 days (If it is explained, my apologies for not having understood it).
Some people have said the slowness is caused by an increase in requests-per-second, but I wonder whether that's an effect of the problem, rather than a cause, because of editors having to make multiple requests for pages before they appear.
It seems to me that there's been a change in kind, not degree, in the last 10 days. Any information from those who may know what has caused this would be much appreciated.
Slim