Editing Encyclopedia:Historical archive/Lag (section)

==Lagging Problem==

Often the Wikipedia server gets into a mode where it does not respond for periods of over one minute -- a huge amount of time in the Internet world.

Yeah, like today: 2 hours! Sheesh.

=== Effects of lagging ===

* Readers are frustrated in their inability to see pages.
* Readers are frustrated in their inability to edit pages. Sometimes they lose their work.

=== Possible Causes ===
* [http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=584443&group_id=34373&atid=411192 Saving pages with many links is slow]
* Someone running a long query?
* Some guy in Arkansas downloading the entire site, including diffs and user contributions pages with varying numbers of return results set, with a spider that doesn't have a throttle control (now blocked)

=== Proposed Solutions ===

''Note: if a solution isn't keyed to a cause, it's not likely to really solve anything.''
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* '''lagging''' Does anybody know why the site is lagging so bad? [[User:129.186.80.116|129.186.80.116]] 17:53 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC) Yes someone plz direct me to or create a tech page which explains the lag. [[User:Lir|Lir]] 17:59 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC) Don't remove this until somebody tells me where else I can go to put things like this. [[User:Lir|Lir]] 18:11 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)
:I've noticed it too. Try [[Talk:Main_Page]]. Its been going on for days. Sometimes causing me server not found errors. But how do you know what it is? I assume just too many people online at the same time. It goes away at night. [[User:Rlee0001|Rlee0001]] 18:19 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)

[[MySQL]] has really crappy table locking, and blocks everything when certain slow operations are being done. We're looking into replacing it with [[Postgresql]], which is said to scale better. But, first I have to adapt the code, change the table definitions, make sure it works on my home server, set up a test installation here before we go converting hundreds of megabytes of databasey goodness willy-nilly. --[[User:Brion VIBBER|Brion]] 21:16 Oct 29, 2002 (UTC)

You might also want to look at doing "What links here" on pages linked to by '''every single one''' of Ram-Man's 36000 or so pages... these will predictably lock up for ages. I imagine that these and similar links are being hit periodically... -- Anon.

I am almost positive that "saving pages with too many links" is not the problem, unless they are external links or something like that.  Yesterday, I updated the "Multiple-Place Names" page.  It has over 1,200 links and it took a second or too longer because it was a large page, but not a serious lag. If *that* page doesn't cause any trouble, then no page should. -- [[User:Ram-Man|Ram-Man]]

Inclined to concur. I have a few pages with a large number of links (e.g. [[Norse mythology]]) which have dependants and dependancies in abundance and they seem as good as gold. [[user:sjc]]

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(Discussion moved from [[Wikipedia:Village pump]])