# What's wrong with Wikipedia? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [November 22, 2005, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283 "2005-11-22T18:17:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![elmwood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmwood/32/3060_2.png) [@elmwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elmwood)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/1 "2005-11-22T18:17:50Z")
Seriously, in the past two months, whenever I’ve visited Wikipedia, I feelmlike it’s running on an Atari 520ST connected to the world with a 1200 baud modem. It’s just slow, slow, slow, and eight times out of ten clicking on a link just gets me the following: [quote=Wikipedia] Fout Fel Fallo 错误 錯誤 Erreur Error Fehler エラー Błąd Errore Erro p.quote] What’s going on? Did they ake a massive downgrade? ---
**Author:** ![Uncommon\_Sense](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/f9ae1b/32.png) [@Uncommon\_Sense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Uncommon_Sense)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 6:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/2 "2005-11-22T18:23:04Z")
maybe it has something to do with your migratory M’s. 🙂 ---
**Author:** ![Mahaloth](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mahaloth/32/1079_2.png) [@Mahaloth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mahaloth)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 8:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/3 "2005-11-22T20:45:35Z")
I agree. Wikipedia is overburdened and has been getting less and less visits from me, since it I never know when it will run correctly. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [November 22, 2005, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/4 "2005-11-22T21:05:44Z")
Strangely enough they are doing a server upgrade today. They are an underpowered Non-profit group. Jim ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 3:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/5 "2005-11-23T03:42:22Z")
“No-one goes there any more, it’s too crowded” - Sam Goldwyn. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 3:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/6 "2005-11-23T03:46:52Z")
> [@Askance](#): > > “No-one goes there any more, it’s too crowded” - Sam Goldwyn. Are you sure? I thought that was Yogi. He said it about a restaurant. Jim ---
**Author:** ![KellyM](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/57b2e6/32.png) [@KellyM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KellyM)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 4:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/7 "2005-11-23T04:16:53Z")
Wikipedia is an incredibly busy site; recently we peaked at 6000 page requests per second through the squid farm. Wikipedia has more traffic than the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and the San Francisco Chronicle, combined. The Wikimedia Foundation has over 100 servers running to make all this work. The following discussion is my understanding based on discussions with other administrators and a couple of developers. Some of this information may be mistaken, although I am trying to be as accurate as possible. The main reason for the slowness of late has been overloads at the media server. Until just recently, we’ve had a single media server for all of Wikipedia. This server has been increasingly overloaded of late, and has been slowing all sorts of things down. The nonresponsiveness of this server has caused the frontend squid caches to experience thread stalls and other problems, which make the site overall slower. In order to remediate this problem the developers have implemented a media cluster, spreading the load for serving images over several servers. This should hopefully reduce contention for media content and reduce the frequency of squid stalls. The other underlying problem is more difficult because it cannot be solved by throwing more hardware at it. We’re reaching the technological limits of the MySQL database software to process and replicate transactions (which are caused by edits). We’ve already thrown just about as much hardware at the master server as we can. We need a solution that allows for multimaster replication, but there isn’t a solution in the realm of free software that offers that. Getting past this scaling point is not going to be easy. ---
**Author:** ![ccwaterback](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/df705f/32.png) [@ccwaterback](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ccwaterback)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 4:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/8 "2005-11-23T04:36:04Z")
> [@KellyM](#): > > The following discussion is my understanding based on discussions with other administrators and a couple of developers. Some of this information may be mistaken, although I am trying to be as accurate as possible. Wow, is this an excellent sig line. Especially to keep the cottonpickin nitpickers at bay. ---
**Author:** ![Revtim](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/revtim/32/1042_2.png) [@Revtim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Revtim)\ **Post date:** [November 23, 2005, 1:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/9 "2005-11-23T13:23:59Z")
Squid problems, eh? Damn cephalopods. ---
**Author:** ![Askance](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/askance/32/8281_2.png) [@Askance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Askance)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2005, 2:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/10 "2005-11-24T02:04:59Z")
> [@jrfranchi](#): > > Are you sure? I thought that was Yogi. He said it about a restaurant. No, in fact I’m pretty sure it’s apocryphal, but is routinely attributed to both those fine gents. ---
**Author:** ![Kolak\_of\_Twilo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kolak_of_twilo/32/73_2.png) [@Kolak\_of\_Twilo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kolak_of_Twilo)\ **Post date:** [November 24, 2005, 4:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/11 "2005-11-24T04:28:10Z")
I just went and checked it out and it seems to be running a good deal faster than it has for the last week or so. Not perfect, but a definite improvement. I imagine saving every edited version of every page has something to do with the overall problem. I think that is part of what **KellyM** was talking about in the earlier post. There has been a notice on the front page for the last week or so saying they were undergoing an upgrade. ---
**Author:** ![KellyM](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/57b2e6/32.png) [@KellyM](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/KellyM)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2005, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/12 "2005-11-27T20:49:28Z")
Here’s a [report](http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Hardware_and_hosting_report) from one of Wikimedia’s system engineers on the state of the server cluster. ---
**Author:** ![astro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9dc877/32.png) [@astro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/astro)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2005, 8:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/13 "2005-11-27T20:59:58Z")
> [@KellyM](#): > > The other underlying problem is more difficult because it cannot be solved by throwing more hardware at it. We’re reaching the technological limits of the MySQL database software to process and replicate transactions (which are caused by edits). We’ve already thrown just about as much hardware at the master server as we can. We need a solution that allows for multimaster replication, but there isn’t a solution in the realm of free software that offers that. Getting past this scaling point is not going to be easy. So what non-free commercial database software can handle it? Oracle? Can you get them to donate the software because of the good stuff you guys do? ---
**Author:** ![samclem](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/a9a28c/32.png) [@samclem](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/samclem)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2005, 9:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/14 "2005-11-27T21:21:19Z")
> [@Askance](#): > > “No-one goes there any more, it’s too crowded” - Sam Goldwyn. > [@jrfranchi](#): > > Are you sure? I thought that was Yogi. He said it about a restaurant. > > Jim For sure Yogi didn’t invent it. We can find it in print from 1940. As to whether Goldwyn started it, I don’t have an opinion. ---
**Author:** ![What\_Exit](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/what_exit/32/10652_2.png) [@What\_Exit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/What_Exit)\ **Post date:** [November 27, 2005, 9:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/15 "2005-11-27T21:33:57Z")
> [@samclem](#): > > For sure Yogi didn’t invent it. We can find it in print from 1940. As to whether Goldwyn started it, I don’t have an opinion. Well Yogi always said > [@](#): > > “I didn’t really say everything I said.” Jim ---
**Author:** ![lee](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lee/32/7455_2.png) [@lee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lee)\ **Post date:** [November 28, 2005, 1:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/16 "2005-11-28T13:12:09Z")
> [@astro](#): > > So what non-free commercial database software can handle it? Oracle? Can you get them to donate the software because of the good stuff you guys do? I think the fear is that if donated Oracle is used then the price will be that every page will have to have a “brought to you by Oracle!” on it and that is not acceptable. I think they can’t afford to buy the needed licenses. Also there is a strong preference for open source software by many there. ---
**Author:** ![elmwood](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/elmwood/32/3060_2.png) [@elmwood](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/elmwood)\ **Post date:** [November 29, 2005, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/whats-wrong-with-wikipedia/332283/17 "2005-11-29T16:09:39Z")
It does seem to be running much faster now. As for Oracle, well, the software that runs Wikipedia is open source, and distributed to anyone that wants to start a wiki of their own. Most Web hosts offer MySQL databases, but none that I know of offer Oracle. Moving to Oracle would make the software far less useful to others.