[WikiEN-l] Fwd: [Wikitech-l] Downtime this morning

[Tim Starling]

stevertigo wrote:
> Carcharoth <carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> nagios?
>> ganglia?
>> 4-CPU apache?
>> scap?
>> swap?
>> memcached node?
>> <eyes glazing over>
>> Is it fixed now? Oh, good. :-)
> 
> Off the top of my head...
> 
> "Nagios" is ostensibly the report server and caching manager and
> "ganglia" IIRC is a page caching manager. 

Actually neither of them are "caching managers" or have any direct
role in caching. This isn't the forum to go into a detailed discussion
of what they do mean, and a google search would do just as well to
fill Carcharoth in, if he was actually interested, which he obviously
isn't.

> "Caching" basically just
> means keeping wiki pages in RAM so that things get fetched quickly -
> most people are not logged in so they get the same HTML and reuse the
> same CSS.

This is not particularly accurate either.

> The main concept was that the error not only caused caching servers
> that were supposed to keep pages in RAM had to dump these pages into
> swap memory, but it affected a main caching node through which other
> nodes... do stuff... apparently. "Memcached" is the name of the
> caching software, or rather one of them, and the first one implemented
> here. IIRC it was first developed for /. (?), 

I think you mean LiveJournal.

> and kind of kept WP
> barely alive through the great traffic growth spurts of 04 and 05.
> 
> I looked up "scap" and still dunno what it is.

http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Scap


Liam Wyatt wrote:
> Just like there's a certain amount of (anti)prestige associated with being
> one of the admins who've managed to delete the mainpage
> http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Log&page=Main_Page is
> there also a barnstar for being a techie who has unintentionally taken the
> whole site down? :-)

We don't make a big deal of it. Unlike deleting the main page,
crashing the site is an easy mistake to make.

-- Tim Starling