On 11-03-14 03:05 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
On 15/03/11 02:44, William Allen Simpson wrote:
Thanks for responding. I hoping to help track
down the reason we're
getting so many Proxy Errors, but sadly this was a general problem.
Don't know what a "MJ issue in the long tail" means?
Well, an
"MJ issue" is a special kind of performance problem that
affects very popular pages, like how popular the [[Michael Jackson]]
article was in the few hours after his death. See wikitech-l from
around that date. The "long tail" is a buzzword referring to the
low-frequency end of a Zipf distribution, i.e. the least popular
articles. So it's hard to see how an MJ issue could be in the long
tail. I think he just means an MJ issue.
-- Tim Starling
There's
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail -- ;) and yes I
understand the irony of quoting Wikipedia in a discussion about WP on wikitech.
I think he might mean that invalidating the cache of a large number of semi-popular long
tail pages (being the long numper pages we serve less hits to, but hit a similar volume of
traffic to a page like MW's when you add all of them together) at the same time could
create a similar performance issue to the invalidation of a single extremely article
article like MJ was. Simply because we're invalidating a number of not top-## pages,
but popular enough that the total number of people viewing the collection of pages gets
close to the traffic one MJ-popular article gets.
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [
http://daniel.friesen.name]