Wikipedia:New server madness

Please read the mailing list announcement (/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-May/010117) about the new server first.

Also this post to the tech list (http://pliny.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-May/003890) details new changes to the caching subsystem.

Executive summary:

• New web server takes load off database server
• New page caching system takes load off web server
  • Caching is done for pages by users who are not logged in (so default settings). To accomodate this, your IP address is no longer displayed in the upper-right corner of the page. (If someone leaves a message in the anon-talk page from Recentchanges, the anon user should see the "you've got messages" link and can get to the page that way.)
  • There may be some new and fun bugs in this regard. :)
• Other bugs and problems:
  • --> There's a weird problem where edits may be incorrectly attributed (with user name, but not ID) after a login session times out. <-- This causes edits to appear to be listed under a user name in history/RC/etc, but not show up in contributions lists. Display in lists is likewise incorrect, with contribs links instead of user pages etc. Sysops will see 'block' links in RC for such users. Such users will see "You have new messages" links to their user talk pages even after they've logged out. This may be a new bug in the login code. All edits that are affected by this can be "fixed" when convenient by matching the user names with their ID numbers, so it is not a permanent corruption problem.
    • This one should be fixed now. --Brion 22:01 24 May 2003 (UTC)
      • The fix doesn't appear to be fully functional, my login in session was timed out when I signed my message on Talk:Doughnut with the tilde technique and while it stored my user name it didn't store my id. Same ought to happen here --Imran[?] 00:05 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
        • Hmm, it might not be clearing the nickname field. Sigh... --Brion 00:23 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)
  • Article count has stopped updating.
    • The new option to explicitly disable page view counters seems to have accidentally disabled the article page count as well. I've put it back online, and recalculated the current number. Note that the latest revision uses the new reformed counter criterion, which checks for existence of links instead of comma count, so the new number may be slightly different. --Brion 05:55 25 May 2003 (UTC)

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I've just made a large number of edits, major and minor. no problems so far :-) the speed is very nice too! -- Tarquin 12:46 May 14, 2003 (UTC) .... hmm. intransitive was moved to intransitive verb but when I click on intransitive in RC, I get an old page with the title "intransitive". weird.

Seems to be a caching issue, I've seen this too. Timestamp is probably not getting updated properly. --Brion 04:52 23 May 2003 (UTC)

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It was REALLY fast. Then, when everyone hit it, it was AWFULLY slow. Now, with the caching implemented for anonymous users, things seem to better than the one-machine non-caching version (hooray! an improvement!). More performance measurements (to find and remove bottlenecks) would seem worthwhile. Dwheeler 21:01 16 May 2003 (UTC)

Once things are sure to be stable, I think it's high time that this major equipment structure was noted to the world. E.G., perhaps Linux Weekly News http://lwn.net would be interested in this as an excuse to talk to someone about Wikipedia. Is there a short write-up on "here's what just happened" somewhere? Dwheeler 22:29 15 May 2003 (UTC)

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It's madness I tell you, madness. (No, not really. Certainly not as mad as the time someone forgot to adjust the width of the picture of the rook. That was frightening, and mad.) The new server is working o.k., except the Main Page graphic didn't load on IE 6. -- Two Halves not logged in

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Tables no longer get cut off in the edit preview if the text is short & the preview is at the top. Nice one Brion. Tannin

PS: The caching problem seems to have dissapeared entirely now, and I've not done anything at my end, so it must be your end. Good! Tannin

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I am noticing some weirdness with User:David Martland; his signed-in account seems to be treated the same as an IP address editor and his contributions list doesn't seem to be staying up to date (note he created Nicola Stilo). - Hephaestos 20:09 18 May 2003 (UTC)

Same weirdness here. This is what I see right now on RC:

Finland-Swedish (cur (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Finland-Swedish&diff=0&oldid=0); hist (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Finland-Swedish&action=history)) . . Vkem (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Contributions&target=Vkem) (Talk | block (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Special:Blockip&ip=Vkem))

And instead of a link to Vkem's user page there is only a link to the user contribs of Vkem (which is the same story after I click on the hist link and then go to Vkem's user page link). --mav

More weirdness with User:NBtarheel33, when I click on his name in this page history (/w/wiki.phtml?title=Bryleigh%27s_Theorem&action=history), it takes me to his contributions which says that he/she's only contribution was to anohter article. Typing the name in the address bar /wiki/User:NBtarheel33 shows the user page which discouragingly says "the penis vandal". -- Ams80 07:36 20 May 2003 (UTC)

Also just noticed that in New Pages, some logged in users names appear as text without a link. The three I can see now are Robert Merkel, Vkem[?] and Sportsdude820[?]. I'm not absolutely sure that it's not supposed to do this but I don't think it should. -- Ams80 08:05 20 May 2003 (UTC) (P.S. Robert Merkel created a page at 08:18 20 May 2003 if you want to go and see what I mean)

And another, User:Realpolitik[?] has no edit history but has been creating lots of new pages. -- Ams80

This is a known bug, see up at top. --Brion 09:22 20 May 2003 (UTC)

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The article count stopped at 120,701 but it seems to have increased by 3 to 120,704. :-s -fonzy

Is it just me, or are the numbers on Special:Statistics now stuck as well? -- Minesweeper 23:49 20 May 2003 (UTC)

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(cur) (last) . . M 10:21 14 May 2003 . . Cyp
(cur) (last) . . M 10:15 14 May 2003 . . Cyp

By the way, the top edit there wasn't mine... Shows me blanking the page, which I didn't do, unless my browser malfunctioned somehow. كسيپ Cyp 06:11 21 May 2003 (UTC)

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Kudos on a speedier boxen --Christopher Mahan 10:23 21 May 2003 (UTC)

Dido on that! user:Zanimum

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Just edited irregular verb and the edit has not been correctly attributed. In fact the edit doesn't even appear in the changes list, yet the edit **has** taken place. A little confusing! I was not logged in at the time. around 11:25 25 May 2003 (UTC) David Martland

I do see an entry in the web server log at 11:17:35 that looks like it could have been your edit, but is not recorded in either recentchanges or the page history. David, can you tell me whether the latest revision to the article includes your changes or not? --Brion 19:32 25 May 2003 (UTC)

Love da server!!! But . . . a problem which might be linked to it. I tried to email someone to be told I wasn't logged in, which as I had spent four hours editing stuff was puzzling. I logged in *again* but got the same message. I then found my email account had disappeared from my preferences. I have since as a test tried to email 10 people picked at random from from the Recent Changes page. 1 had an email account (Mav of course!), 9 didn't. Has the change over lost some people's email account details? Of course those 9 might never have had them to start off with. But that still doesn't explain where mine went to. I have received an email from three wiki users in the last few weeks so it seems have to have been in my preferences up to the changeover but not since. FearÉÍREANN 04:38 26 May 2003 (UTC)

Let me guess: you're using Mozilla or a Mozilla-based browser, and told the browser to save your name/password on the login form? If so, the workaround is clear out any saved form info for wikipedia.org and don't let it save it again. It seems to trigger on part of the preferences dialogue and overwrites the e-mail address field (since there is such a field on the login form too, but when just logging in it's left blank...) --Brion 04:46 26 May 2003 (UTC)

(Checking logs): I see you're using Safari, actually... may have a similar bug, though. (Or it may have just bitten you some time ago when I made you try Netscape 7. ;) I'll try with Konqueror, and I'll play with Safari at work tomorrow. --Brion 04:53 26 May 2003 (UTC)

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Someone created a page called Spearman's ρ[?]. Attempting to move this to Spearman's rho using the move page function caused something funny to happen, generating a page called [[Spearman's Ï*]]. The last two chars are hex CF, hex 81, I think.

This looks like UTF-8 vs. ISO 8859-1 charset encoding problems to me. I did a cut-and-paste move to fix things. The Anome 13:06 28 May 2003 (UTC)

Yep. CF 81 appears to be correct Unicode UTF-8 for \rho: see http://www.w3.org/2001/06/utf-8-test/TeX ... can someone check my working? The Anome 13:21 28 May 2003 (UTC)

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Since today (or maybe earlier?) I am experiencing frequent pausing (after about 2-5 minutes of usage), in which "wikipedia.org" doesn't respond (but meta and other languages seem to continue working, as well as other web sites, of course). To resolve this, I have to close all the windows of the browser (IE) and then open wikipedia.org again and everything is fine (for about a minute and then it pauses again). Anyone else experiencing this? this is weird and very annoying. -- Rotem Dan 19:04 30 May 2003 (UTC)

Seems to have stopped, still weird -- Rotem Dan 19:58 30 May 2003 (UTC)

The problem has returned today (right now, actually) and yesterday during noon and afternoon hours (UTC +3), Can someone give any explanation why this is happening, server load? or some other server problem? any way around it? -- Rotem Dan 15:48 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm not experiencing the problem myself (but I haven't been using IE), so I can't say for sure. I don't think it's a server problem, though afternoon in UTC+3 is about where our peak hours are (stats chart (/stats/hourly_usage_200305.png))... --Brion 21:54 1 Jun 2003 (UTC)

The problem is happening right now, it seems like the connection to wikipedia.org, at some point (after a number of minutes), starts to constantly pause and timeout, no matter what page I choose to load. When I reopen the explorer windows, everything is working like magic.

Maybe it's because the (HTTP/database) connection gets a lower priority, so it stops responding when there is high load, and when I reopen the browser a new connection is opened with a higher priority? (I don't really understand how Apache/MySQL works so this is just some vague speculation) -- Rotem Dan 13:17 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Have you tried other browsers (mozilla, opera) to see if they have the same problem, or is it IE-specific? Just hoping we can narrow this down... --Brion 21:41 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I'm using mozilla (v1.4) sometimes, but not recently ,and I have opera somewhere.. I will try them both at noon tomorrow. Currently there's no problem of timeouts, seems to work fine, thanks for the support.. -- Rotem Dan 21:50 2 Jun 2003 (UTC)

I've encountered the problem in IE6, and then immediatly switched to Mozilla1.4RC1, and the problem was solved. Thanks, I now think this has to do with my IE/windows version, and not the site, I also have an antiqued computer and operating system (PII/Win98) so that might also be related.. -- Rotem Dan 09:39 7 Jun 2003 (UTC)

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I haven't been able to get into Wikipedia for the last two days. It kept timing out. I had to meet my cravings to edit at http://simple.wikipedia.com/ instead. Angela. 31 May 2003. [I found out this was due to a routing problem with my ISP Angela 22:11 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)]

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The Recent changes special page indicates that about an hour ago there was a ten minute pause; during which no-one was able to save anything. I myself got a longwindided database error message just about that time, and decided to take a time out at that point. Cimon Avaro on a pogo stick 23:38 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-June/010474

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I keep getting this error:

 Could not connect to DB on 130.94.122.197
 Host 'larousse.wikipedia.org' is blocked because of many connection errors.
 Unblock with 'mysqladmin flush-hosts'

Angela 22:11 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Same here! -- 205.175.225.5[?] 22:18 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

same here using safari, netscape and explorer. And when I sent a message on the wiki list I was told I was a non-member trying to contact a members only list! FearÉIREANN I even got it when trying to save a message on this page. 23:13 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)

Same here (Both Explorer and Mozilla), it also said to write a mail to wikidown@wikipedia.org; I did but it bounced back saying that the user is unknown. Everything seems back to normal now though. Laz 23:50 19 Jun 2003 (UTC)