Reposting from techblog:
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/03/site-fixes/
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Site fixes this week
We’re still in the middle of cleaning up some lingering issues from the
1.17 deployment, and despite our best efforts, you may see a little bit of
quirkiness in the site:
* One problem with the site since the deployment was a problem with our
job queue, which meant that emails that were supposed to be sent from
the site weren’t. This backlog was removed last night, and a lot of
pent-up email was sent.
* There were some HTML cache invalidations that caused parts of the site
to get overloaded for a few minutes.
* Yesterday, we started the deployment of the category sorting
improvements. We deployed some modifications to the database today.
This resulted in a few hiccups on the site that we’ve since mostly
recovered from.
Category collation
One key set of improvements in the MediaWiki 1.17 release is
the [1]category sorting work spearheaded by Aryeh Gregor. This code will
eventually improve the sorting of categories in different languages,
allowing us to choose the most appropriate sort order for the language.
For now, we’re at least switching over to a more sensible sorting
algorithm ([2]Unicode Collation Algorithm (UCA)), and have made other
improvements to sorting.
This set of changes required a modification of the database that we didn’t
believe was risky, but was irreversible. Given [3]how complicated the
initial 1.17 deployment was, we decided to hold back on deploying this
work.
There are still some maintenance scripts left to run before this work is
fully-deployed, but most parts of this are done.
Other fixes
We’re also aware of and working on [4]other problems with the job queue.
We’re investigating these problems and hope to have these fixed soon.
1.
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.17/Category_sorting
2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode_collation_algorithm
3.
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2011/02/main-deployment-of-mediawiki-1-17-to-…
4.
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=27727