When Wikipedia goes down Options Rating

[thekohser]

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?

[michael]

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.

[luke]

seems to be working again for the moment

[gomi]

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.

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

[anthony]

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

18:00 brion: things seem at least semi-working.

1. everything hung
2. suda had some kind of kernel crash
3. after reboot, it was found to have a couple flaky disks
4. brion hacked up MW config files to skip the NFS logging
5. mark set up an alternate /home NFS server

15:00 mark: Site down completely. Post-mortem:

1. Rob is untangling power cables in rack B2, and both asw-b2-pmtpa and asw3-pmtpa (in B4) lose power
2. Two racks unreachable, PyBal sees too many hosts down and won't depool more
3. Rob brings power to asw-b2-pmtpa back up, but connectivity loss to B4 is not noticed
4. Mark investigates why LVS isn't working, adjusts PyBal parameters, until PyBal pools not a single server
5. Apaches are unhappy about completely missing ES clusters
6. Connectivity loss to B4 discovered, restored
7. Site back online

There is an oversighted edit though, that read:

14:45 godwin/gardner: Prepare downtime donation message and take a hammer to a few hard drives.

Just kidding.

[michael]

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

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...

[cyofee]

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

[wikiwhistle]

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.

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.

This post has been edited by wikiwhistle: Tue 23rd September 2008, 1:04pm

[LaraLove]

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.

[GlassBeadGame]

There is an oversighted edit though, that read:

14:45 godwin/gardner: Prepare downtime donation message and take a hammer to a few hard drives.

Just kidding.

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.

[Sylar]

The English Wikipedia is extremely slow right now.

Edit: And, it's now down.

This post has been edited by Sylar: Wed 5th November 2008, 2:20am

[lolwut]

Pages are not loading for me at the moment.

[GlassBeadGame]

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."

[Eva Destruction]

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.

[lolwut]

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."

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.

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.

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.

[MZMcBride]

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.

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.

[lolwut]

Wikipedia is slow as fuck tonight.

[Apathetic]

Wikipedia is slow as fuck tonight.

indeed !

[LaraLove]

Wikipedia is slow as fuck tonight.

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.

[Eva Destruction]

Wikipedia is slow as fuck tonight.

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.