Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-05-23/Technology report

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

Note from the editor: the issue of the Signpost in a fortnight's time will be the first anniversary of my time in the role of "Technology Report" lead. In that time, the flavour of the report has not changed greatly: it is much as it ever was. I would like the 6 June issue to include a handful of trial elements, to see if they meet with approval; as such, it would be great to take comments on this issue about what you, Signpost readers, think about the "Technology Report" and what suggestions you may have. Thank you.

Slowness affecting Wikimedia sites

Periods of intermittent slowness (many causing timeouts and consequently edits being lost) intensified this week, prompting a raft of complaints at the English Wikipedia's Technical Village Pump (permalink). The issues were raised on the Foundation's mailing list, prompting WMF Deputy Director Erik Möller to relay suggestions from the Wikimedia operations team as to what might be behind the issues, which have affected users as far apart as the east coast of the United States and Australia:

(The extension deployed on May 18 - cf. bug #21919 - was GoogleNewsSitemap, an extension designed to make wikis, in this case the English Wikinews site, more accessible to the Google News aggregation service.) The problems underline the need for the forthcoming Ashburn, Virginia data centre, through which requests could be rerouted. In his email, Möller also warned against checking the usual reports on Wikimedia uptime at http://ganglia.wikimedia.org, which is "in the process of being fixed".

In unrelated news, this week also saw a fatal error which made Wikimedia Commons unable to accept edits for a period of some minutes (bug #29078).

In brief

Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for many weeks.