Tech:Site slowdown

What happens

I can't quickly find the existing conversations about it, I think there are a couple... but Wikitravel is often running very slow, STILL, after much talk about it from several users. It's become less of a complaint for me and more of a showstopper. Often when I find that I have 20 or 30 minutes to contribute I only accomplish half or a third or what I could if the site was running comparably to Wikipedia or any other site. It's often the reason that I move on to doing other things on any given day, when I get tired of waiting for pages to load. It keeps me from wanting to patrol edits, where I need to open many window at once and not wait 10 minutes for them to all load. In all honesty, I'm considering halting my contributing even further until the site is seriously sped up.

It appears to me that static pages and those with short edit histories are not too bad, but it's the dynamically generated pages (esp. diffs and edits) of big/long articles (VFD, Main Page, Japan, Singapore etc) that are excruciatingly slow to load. DB problems? Jpatokal 00:38, 17 February 2008 (EST)

Special:Watchlist is the main page I start Wikitravel with, and it takes minutes to load every time. --DenisYurkin 03:13, 17 February 2008 (EST)

When it happens

It goes up and down, but for me at least, it happens fairly regularly, almost every time I'm on the site.

How to fix it

I recall Evan or someone mentioning at some point that something was added to the site by IB to track page views or something like to that effect, and that that may have to do with the problem... if it is can we remove it? – cacahuate ^talk 19:57, 17 February 2008 (EST)

Additional comments

This problem is so severe on :en for me that I've basically given up working on that site, at least until the problem is resolved. --Peter ^Talk 22:09, 16 February 2008 (EST)

Sign below, please

• – cacahuate ^talk 13:18, 16 February 2008 (EST)
• Me too. This has gone beyond annoying into outright painful, even when editing in the middle of the night US time. Jpatokal 00:36, 17 February 2008 (EST)
• Watchlist and diffs, most of the time. --DenisYurkin 03:13, 17 February 2008 (EST)
• Do something. And tell us when you have! Riggwelter 16:52, 18 February 2008 (EST)
• It's ridiculous. Gorilla Jones 08:20, 21 February 2008 (EST)
• Definitely will limit my enthusiasm for editing.--Padraic 11:10, 21 February 2008 (EST)
• Agreed on all counts. -- Bill-on-the-Hill 11:50, 21 February 2008 (EST)
• As usual, I do not get it. I have emailed the general Manager at IB and left him a voice message. If you want to call the number is 800-692-2200 2old 11:54, 21 February 2008 (EST)
• It's bad. Not good for our contributors. Not good for anybody. --OldPine 11:59, 21 February 2008 (EST)
• Heres a new one, I added to Tech:Blocking all anonymous log ins on en:? . When I clicked save, it said there is no text on this page and all text has dissapeared.It was oldpines report, now gone, gone, gone. 2old 12:04, 21 February 2008 (EST)

It's there. I guess the page title I used was a bad one--probably due to the ?. It's at Tech:Blocking all anonymous log ins on en now. Just noticed that when I placed that bug report that it logged the blocked IP address rather than mine. -- OldPine 12:27, 21 February 2008 (EST)

Second server

Sorry it has taken awhile to post here. We have been working on the problem and hoped to come on once we fixed it. Our tech team did an analysis of the performance of the application and database servers, and determined that while the database server is performing fine, the application server has been maxing out. Our tech team will come on to post more detail on that.

We bought and configured a second application server and deployed it earlier this week. However, there have been some problems with that implementation which have prevented it from going live. They are working on the problem this morning. I'm optimistic this will go live shortly, but will hold off setting an exact time to avoid any false promises. The expectation is that this should fully solve the problem. If it proves to be only a partial solution, we will order a third application server to further handle the load.

Thank you for your patience on this. I know the site has been frustrating recently, and we hope to get this fixed completely this week.

Also, we have hired a person who is going to be responsible for daily involvement on Wikitravel. We have been remiss in not being more present here on Shared, and she will be remedying that. She just started and we'll introduce her later today.

I'm also meeting today with our tech team to come up with a better process for responding to bug notices and other tech requests. We need to be doing a better job on this, and we will. Redondo 12:53, 21 February 2008 (EST)