[Wikimedia-l] Throttling (was: Re: Please can someone put 50p in the meter)

[WereSpielChequers]

Hi John,

60 edits a minute sounds high, and probably faster than most of these
sessions run at, but not if it is as I suspect, calculated every few
seconds.  So if the tutor says "all save now" and ten people hit enter
simultaneously the attempted editing rate is briefly rather more than 1 per
second - hence the throttle kicks in and the tutorial collapses in chaos
with several students getting throttling errors at the same time. It would
be nice to think that the WiFi we used was going through the same IP as the
rest of the British library and that we merely lifted the normal editing
rate above 60 edits a minute, but I suspect that the rate is calculated
rather more frequently than every minute.

Presumably established users of some sort are whitelisted through this? If
so it could explain a longstanding Cat a Lot problem. I frequently use Cat
a lot to categorise images on Commons and my personal editing rate there
has gone far above 60 edits a minute, however I'm pretty sure I'd be on any
commons whitelist. But other editors have complained that Cat a Lot doesn't
work for them and mysteriously hangs or fails, Is it possible that this
throttling feature could be  the cause of that problem as well?

If so perhaps it would be a good idea to analyse some of the recent
incidents where this feature has kicked in, see how often it disrupts
goodfaith editing and how often it disrupts badfaith editing that wouldn't
have triggered the edit filter. Maybe this was once a net benefit, but with
the edit filter dealing with most badfaith editing, and increasing amounts
of editing workshops and tools like Catalot, perhaps this feature has
transitioned from net positive to net negative? Alternatively could we have
a process where we can whitelist the IP Addresses of places where we are
running training sessions, and put  note on
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki_talk:Gadget-Cat-a-lot.jsexplaining
how to spot if your editing has been throttled and how to get
yourself Whitelisted

WSC

>
> Message: 6
> Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2012 11:36:03 -0400
> From: John <phoenixoverride at gmail.com>
> To: Wikimedia Mailing List <wikimedia-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Throttling (was: Re: Please can someone put
>         50p in the meter)
> Message-ID:
>         <
> CAP-JHpmCQPX1SW5CMFQtWtMXP6MXf2z5NQ_PJtp2rY3meq1kuw at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>
> Next time you get said message can you take a screenshot and let us
> know, (it is by default somewhere over 60/edits per minute)
>
> On Sun, Oct 14, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Andrew Gray <andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk>
> wrote:
> > On 14 October 2012 15:50, John <phoenixoverride at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> IPs shouldnt get hit with an edit throttle, (it is really really high)
> >
> > It doesn't seem it! Over the past few months, I've had it triggered
> > four times in an hour in two workshops, and one or two times in
> > perhaps four more. They're not all at the same location or using the
> > same machines, though they were all using institutional networks.
> > These are all new logged-in contributors editing from - presumably -
> > the same IP; I've not had it happen to me in the same sessions, but
> > that might just be chance.
> >
> > These aren't very busy networks, however, and I can't imagine there's
> > a vast flood of active editing coming from them at the same time as
> > the workshop...
> >
> > Is it possible to see where this is configured?
> >
> > --
> > - Andrew Gray
> >   andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk
> >
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>