Talk:Wikimedia servers

Archived to Talk:Wikimedia servers/archive1

Name suggestions

If you would like to suggest a name, please enter it and link to the relavant Wikipedia article.

Encyclopediasts or similiar (with articles)

• Mills - John Mills
• Franklin - Ben Franklin (author of Poor Richard's Almanac). (or/and w:en:Rosalind Franklin ?)
• panckoucke - see w:en:Encyclopédie Méthodique or w:de:Charles Joseph Panckoucke (editor of the « Encyclopédie Méthodique »)
• ashurbanipal - w:en:Ashurbanipal IV (maybe not an encyclopedist per se, but the first known to try and bring together all knowledge. Sooner or later there must be a server function that such an ancient name would be appropriate for.)
• ephraim or chambers - w:de:Ephraim Chambers/en:Ephraim Chambers
• samuel or orgelbrand - w:de:Samuel Orgelbrand
• johann - for w:de:Johann Georg Krünitz, w:de:Johann Samuel Ersch (en),w:de:Johann Gottfried Gruber (en), w:de:Johann Jacob Leu
• Mortimer - Mortimer Adler - Author/director of planning for Britannica
• Adler - Mortimer Adler - Author/director of planning for Britannica
• Asimov - Isaac Asimov
• Johnson - Samuel Johnson - wrote A Dictionary of the English Language
• Insert name - "Beautiful it may be, but Dale Hoiberg, the editor of Encyclopedia Britannica, thinks there is such a thing as too much information. Wikipedia reminds him of a Jorge Borges story in which the cartographers of an empire make a map so large it's as big as the empire itself and rather useless." Find the name of the fictional cartographer it's a guild of cartographers ...

Others (with articles)

• anning - w:en:Mary Anning British paleontologist.
• voltaire - w:en:Voltaire
• pascal - w:en:Blaise Pascal
• weisstein - w:en:Eric Weisstein (although I regret his restrictive policy about availability of his works)
• pisan or pizan - w:en:Christine de Pizan / w:fr:Christine_de_Pisan (French poet and writer)
• montaigne - w:en:Michel de Montaigne French Renaissance writer
• krug - w:de:Wilhelm Traugott Krug/en:Wilhelm Traugott Krug (philosopher/writer)
• hegel - w:de:Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (en) (philosopher)
• suetonius - w:en:Suetonius / w:la:Gaius_Suetonius_Tranquillius (Roman biographer, most famous for 'Lives of the Caesars')

People without articles

• Al-Munjid (almunjid?) is a famous old arabic encyclopedia, mentioned by Khalid
• chagas - Manuel Pinheiro Chagas
• mellado - Francisco de Paula Mellado
• wassili - Wassili Nikititsch Tatischtschew
• pavel - Pavel Bujnák
• jacob & carl - Jacob Johann Ankarström & Carl Christophersson Gjörwell
• banerjea - K. M. Banerjea
• francis - Francis Lieber
• Black - Adam & Charles Black - Founders of Britannica

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Where are browne and coronelli?

browne and coronelli are listed as Squids on the page, but they are not listed in [1].

Browne is not sending ganglia data for an unknown reason. Coronelli is down. —Kate | Talk 14:08, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)

Why usage statistic doesn't work?

Statistic for wikipedia on this page deosn't work from october. Why?

Because it places too much load on the servers. They will be back at some point when a better way to do it. —Kate | Talk 14:08, 2004 Dec 11 (UTC)

How about copying the raw files to another computer and running webalizer against them to generate the stats? Any news on the progress of getting fresh stats would be appreciated.

Content page edits

User:Kate what are you doing?--213.66.119.190 22:13, 5 Jan 2005 (UTC)

There was a few changes up to [2] that User:Kate reverted and then made some kind of change, what's going on User:Kate?--213.66.119.190 11:22, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Since nobody else would, I'll revert to the mentioned edit and let Kate respond.--213.66.119.190 11:34, 7 Jan 2005 (UTC)

I think she updated the name links. They were just reedited.--213.66.119.190 22:16, 14 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Servers in *.fr

Is there an estimate when the squids in Europe will start helping wikipedia? Is there a good possibility to balance the load between EU/US-squids through round-robin-dns? Would be great to see some more servers helping to cope with the load :-) -- Arno 84.128.35.174 12:06, 6 Jan 2005 (UTC)

They are currently active and serving en: and fr: for users in most of Europe excluding the UK and Ireland. See statistics. Kate.

They seem to be serving the UK as well now. -- Anon, 17 Feb 2005.

discrepentcy: Is "ariel" the master database server or just the standby?

In the table it says "ariel" is the standby and "suda" is the master database server. In the thrid bullet point below it states that "ariel" is the master and "suda" is the standby. Which is correct?

For a while, Ariel was the database master. Recently, Suda was elevated to master status, because of its more powerful IO array.

However Ariel is now the master again, temporarily (explanation). Suda is still the preferred master ATM because although ariel is faster, it has less disk space. Kate

Can I ask if this is still valid after all the fun around the 22nd of Feb? When I was lurking on IRC it seemed that you may have switched again. Thanks. --Haggis 11:11, 23 Feb 2005 (UTC)

ariel is still the master. after some compression and rebuilding of ariel's innodb files, the disk space issue is mostly solved for the moment. after the new hardware order arrives and is burned in, we'll probably change to using that for the new master. kate.

So how do you rate Squid?

I know you folks are working hard and that you have almost unparalleled traffic growth to contend with, but from the user's vantage point I haven't seen a whole lot of site speed improvement in the English Wikipedia since the installation of Squid servers. Some, but not much. Is it a case of solid hardware/software/networking improvements being offset by crazy traffic increase, or have the improvements (particularly Squid) proved disappointing? JDG 05:57, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Before we used Squid we had only two servers, one of which was sorely underpowered, and believe me it was a lot worse. :)

We set up squid well over a year ago; roughly 75% of HTTP requests are cache hits, leaving only 25% for the Apache+PHP cluster to deal with. In the last twelve months our traffic in average hits/sec has increased eightfold; the cache hit ratio has stayed about the same, so in raw numbers cache misses requiring service have also increased eightfold. (That's a doubling every four months.) In the same time we've gone from about 8 servers to about 40, which as you can see doesn't quite match the eightfold increase though it's hard to compare a number like that.

See the Squid stats since the end of February last year: http://wikimedia.org/stats/live/ and our bandwidth usage in the Florida cluster: http://65.59.189.201/www.bomis-total/www.bomis-total.html

Squid's been wonderful: without it we'd have been dead in the water long since (or had to do a lot of redundant work on alternate caching systems to reduce the cache hit service time to be equivalent to what Squid would have given us). Having a front end cache keeps cache hit returns fast, helps free up the apaches' queues for real work, and vastly reduces the impact of spiders and 'flash-mob' hits. --brion 06:21, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Ok, I guess you would have been dead in the water. It's not easy to grasp but I suppose when you reach a certain traffic level you're doing well just to stay even. Google and Yahoo are the undisputed champs for fast response under super heavy usage, but apparently they manage it mostly through brute force: dozens and dozens of regional server farms... I was going to suggest more resources go into load balancing, which I think is more key than caching. But I'm not in much of a position to pontificate. My admin experience was with busy webservers, but way back in `00. I had great results breaking up the load between 6 boxes using simple DNS round robin, but my average concurrent users were at most 1/4 your average... Oh well keep up the good work and I hope the latest fundraiser allows you to actually gain on the problem rather than just keeping pace. JDG 06:41, 20 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Our current load balancing is pretty awful, although it has been getting better recently... there are so many things needing work that it tends to be quite low down on the list of priorities, though. Maybe some day... -Kate. (incidentally, i'm not sure it's more important than caching - if you removed squid, all apaches would be at 100% CPU no matter how you distributed the load ;)