My personal observations/superstitions, which are NOT based on any
technical insight. My mental model is that different Wikipedia
operations require different capabilities, and perhaps in some cases
different servers, and therefore degrade differently on heavy load.
a) For some reason, reloading a page after saving an edit is one of the
LEAST reliable operations and quickly degrades under load. The failure
can take three different forms. The most common is that the browser
times out. Lately, a very common one has been an error message saying
the database is not available. A third form is that the supposedly
edited page was reloaded, but shows the original text rather than the
edited text.
In ALL THREE cases, there's much better than a 50% chance that the edit
actually took place.
In ALL THREE cases, the most sensible thing to do is save the edited
Wiki-marked-up text of the whole article somewhere locally, wait about
five minutes, then try to view the page and see whether the edit took.
b) A very common symptom under heavy load is that actions "take," but
do not become "visible" for many minutes. For example, when preferences
change spontaneously (an infuriating thing which hits me about every
two weeks) and I change them back, my changes USUALLY take effect--but
do not become visible for many minutes afterwards. Until I discovered
this, I was utterly baffled because I would keep trying various things
to "fix" the problem, every possible combination of clearing caches I
could think of and when the changes took several minutes later I had
tried several other things and naturally assumed that it was the last
thing I'd tried, rather than the first.
c) For reasons that baffle me, the "Go" button creates some kind of
search string and does some kind of search. Under heavy load, all
search operations degrade. This means that manually typing
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foobar
is much more reliable in retrieving the Foobar article than typing
"Foobar" into the search box and pressing "Go."
When things are slow, I usually copy the
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
text out of the address box for handy pasting in later.
d) I am trying to learn to welcome the slowdowns as nature's way of
reminding me that I'm spending way too much time on Wikipedia. Of
course, the most infuriating situations are the ones when I MEAN to say
"this article should definitely not be," press SAVE, see that I
accidentally typed "this article should definitely be", press EDIT, fix
it, and get a database error. In these situations, I console myself
with the thought that nobody really cares that much about my opinion.
--
Daniel P. B. Smith, dpbsmith(a)verizon.net
"Elinor Goulding Smith's Great Big Messy Book" is now back in print!
Sample chapter at
http://world.std.com/~dpbsmith/messy.html
Buy it at
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1403314063/