[Wikipedia-l] Re: [WikiEN-l] we're slashdotted

[Brion Vibber]

On mer, 2003-01-22 at 02:15, koyaanisqatsi at nupedia.com wrote:
> Just a note to give everyone a heads-up: anonymous coward submitted a
> story about our 100,000 article milestone, and we are now slashdotted.
>  Bucket brigade at the ready.  ;-)

We're still afloat so far. :)  I gotta go sleep now, and won't be free
to check in on the site until after 11 am (1900 UTC). So if the site
breaks completely in the mean time, please give a shout to jwales and
jasonr at bomis.com and ask them to give the server a solid kick or two.

As temporary measures, I've:
- Put up a static HTML copy of the main page for people following the
direct link to http://www.wikipedia.org/ .  (It won't reflect new edits
or login state.)
- Disabled updates to the page view counters. (They can bunch up when
things are really busy and use all available webserver processes,
stalling new connections.)
- Put the heavy special pages that are disabled part of the day into
disable mode full-time (sorry, will re-enable these tomorrow)
- Re-enabled the Alternative PHP Cache, which should speed up page load
times a little bit by bypassing the PHP script parsing.
- Since APC slightly breaks the current RDF spool generator script, I've
disabled updating of the RDF spools.

This is a newer revision of APC which hopefully won't crash so much as
the old one did. :)  If it's problematic, Jimbo or Magnus go ahead and
comment out the APC section at the top of /usr/local/lib/php.ini and
restart apache.

Note that page view counters, main pages, and all special pages remain
enabled on the less-trafficked other languages. Just on the English are
they disabled. APC caching affects all wikis.

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

WikiKarma: posts defending our honor at Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/01/22/0258226
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