English Wikipedia (and Meta, and French Wikipedia, and Wikiversity, but strangely not Wikiquote) seems to have a server down right now. Anybody else notice this? Additionally, I notice that on the "error" page the Foundation has also craftily mentioned:

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

I wonder if they might be actually planning downtime deliberately, in order to drive up contributions?

They're doing a poor job of planning it if they are...in my three years, I can only count about ten times it has gone down.

seems to be working again for the moment

You must not be on very much. I see a transitory outage every week or two, with some more significant outage every few months.

Take a look at the server admin log (personally I'm subscribed to the RSS feed).





There is an oversighted edit though, that read:



Just kidding.

Really? It's hard for me to recall the last time i ever saw the "servers are down" message for an extended period of time, that's why I said that it must have only been about ten times. I have about 17,000 edits over two Wikipedias, so...

I see glitches and errors every once in a few weeks, but they go away after a refresh or two.

Really? I quite often get the message that they're 'experiencing technical problems' or whatever come up. It usually only lasts a very short time indeed tho. So it must be a matter of luck whether you're trying to edit/view at that time.

When NawlinWiki was doing all his Grawp deletions the other month, the server was being locked down constantly. Only for a couple minutes at a time, but he was causing it repeatedly. I jump on Wikipedia sporadically, usually, and it seemed like every time I tried to make an edit, I was getting an error message. That's a pain in the ass.

Well played. I was complete drawn into the idea that a log item was removed and didn't realize the gag until I had finished reading. Had a nice chuckle.

The English Wikipedia is extremely slow right now.

Edit: And, it's now down.

Pages are not loading for me at the moment.

Reminds of the Woody Allen joke of the two old ladies at the restaurant. First lady says "The food here is so bad." Her friend replies "Yes and the portions are so small."

To be boring for a minute – usually when you get this message it means someone's doing an action that's locked the system (either the devs updating the software, or something which puts a major strain on the server). Renaming an account with a lot of edits will do it, as will deletion/restoration of pages with thousands of revisions – when Nawlinwiki was at his fearless-grawp-hunter peak, you'd get this all the time as he deleted and selective-restored what felt like every single page.

Were you referring to my post there? I do get the joke and understand the analogy, but I actually kinda have more of a love/hate relationship with WP rather than just outright hate.


He's stopped doing that now, probably for good. But he was going for massive overkill. It was pretty funny to watch while it lasted.

There are protections in place now that put large renames in the job queue and prevent deletions of pages with over 5,000 revisions.

Nowadays, when the site is down, it's nearly always related to a server issue of some sort, not something caused by an admin.

Wikipedia is slow as fuck tonight.

indeed !

Servers in the UK are down due to a power outage, so someone said in IRC. I thought all the servers were in the US.

"European proxy caching cluster", apparently.

No problem then. Who the hell cares about those damned Europeans anyway?

BTW, where is Europe? Anywhere near Idaho?

Idaho is a fine place, Malley Baby. We should set up a Wikipedia Meet-up at Couer d'Alene -- a great place to hang out and watch the bikini babes hit the lake.

If any Europeans are really desperate, going via the secure server still works fine.

I'm apparently a European now. Is Europe anywhere near North Carolina? Wikipedia isn't working for me at all, so I'm having to use the secure server.

Actually, it just came up. But it was down for me for about an hour. First the Foundation's "We're sorry our shit's not working, give us money plz" message and then the standard time out page.

You're starting to see the true horror of keeping a major multi-colocated
database website up and going. It's like running LexisNexis, but on open-source
software and with no money and no hot backup. I'm amazed they don't have
major outages every day.

If those servers are in England can someone sue WMF for their contents under English law?

They're not in England (the clue's in the "European") – they're in Holland. Good luck trying to convince the Dutch of the evils of pornography.

Amazing how ignorant your guys are about your favorite "encyclopedia".

Some of the servers are in Tampa, some are in Amsterdam, and some are in Seoul.

PS--the Wikitech hasn't been updated substantially in months/years, so there
are probably other servers elsewhere.

They use Squid. A lot. There's probably no practical way in hell to figure out where
a chunk of data is in a system like this at any given moment.

heh
Evoswitch helps us improve project access in Europe and beyond
June 22nd, 2009
Evoswitch has recently allowed the WMF free access to caching servers at their leading, 100% carbon neutral green data center in the Netherlands.

I don't think the WMF are using the servers in Seoul anymore.

I was thinking more of libel and holding WMF responsible for whats on there (no sec 230).

US based company, so will be immune from overseas libel judgements under the Free Speech Protection Act (assuming it passes) unless the content would also be libellous in the US, so we're back where we started.

And as far as copyright infringement goes, the People's Republic of Laos might be a good choice.

heckers McHeckers, ya; Epic Lulz.



you like my montage????????

slow as hell right now

Are you Emesee in disguise?

no, why do you say that?

down again! =\

http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikit...uly/044406.html

Indeed, it's amazing that they stay up as much as they do, given the number of single points of failure there are in their architecture. To be fair, many of them are forced by their choice to use mysql as a backend database, instead of a more robust product like, say, Oracle.

The router downtime that was mentioned above should have been avoidable if they had a proper hot-spare environment. But that costs a bit more money, and spending money on that would cut down on the size of Jimmy's castle fund.

I think something like two-thirds of their servers are just Squid engines. MediaWiki is way too slow to generate all the pages that Wikimedia serves across all the projects in real time.

It constantly amuses me to hear PHP culties go on about how well PHP scales, citing Wikipedia as proof, when the reality is that PHP scales like crap and the WMF has to throw tons of hardware at their half-assed content engine just to keep up.

Im sure its nothing personal. Accusing people of being each other is a popular sport here.

yea, I made a silly mis-call a while back.

nvm

Yes. It's very strange, and something that's never happened to me before.

did you get the blank white page too?