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]