Mailing List Archive

Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia. Now
> I can't access the pages at all. Is Lir doing something nasty in the
> way of big queries? Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
> My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.

The gratuitous and slanderous innuendo about Lir is a fine example
sharklike behaviour. I see no evidence that she has the technical
ability to do what you suggest. Perhaps you should apologize to her.

Eclecticology

On Thu, Nov 21, 2002 at 01:21:02PM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
>>Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia. Now
>>I can't access the pages at all. Is Lir doing something nasty in the
>>way of big queries? Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
>>My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.
>
>The gratuitous and slanderous innuendo about Lir is a fine example
>sharklike behaviour. I see no evidence that she has the technical
>ability to do what you suggest. Perhaps you should apologize to her.

"She" turns out to be a young male, at least 18 years of age and
probably in his 20's. Cunc can provide more details, I think. It
changes my whole perception of "her".

At 18, I would have had no problem remembering people mentioning on the
mailing list here "be careful about using the URL interface to doing
raw SQL queries, because some queries can REALLY SLOW THE DATABASE
DOWN". We have no idea about this young mans technical abilities, good
or bad. We do know he was immature and unstable enough to threaten to
commit suicide on a public mailing list. He also posted on my
Eleutherphilic Creed article yesterday that the Wikipedia didn't
provide any value over the same information being scattered all over
the web... Sounds to me like he doesn't really care about the Wikipedia
itself, and is getting a charge out of getting people here riled up.

Jonathan

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Jonathan Walther wrote:

> Just 20 minutes ago there was a dramatic slowdown in the Wikipedia. Now
> I can't access the pages at all. Is Lir doing something nasty in the
> way of big queries? Is there a regularly scheduled cron job doing this?
> My attempts to access various pages on the 'pedia are just timing out.
Lir can't run queries, and neither can you, Jonathan. Only users with "sysop" privileges can run queries.

None of the queries I've run have taken longer than a few seconds to return, even though some of this cross-linked between 2 or more tables -- so I don't think dramatic slowdowns are being caused by ad hoc queries.

Brion or someone eles explained a few days ago about how MySQL makes one query wait for another. I suspect that these forced waits tend to "cascade", if you know what that means.

Ed Poor