Finally a replacement for "Site got slashdotted": "Site got Prince'd". I like it.
The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
61–70 of 112 posts
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#62Judge: Pats fans' Deflategate suit 'without merit' see more infor here http://sh.st/IGVR3
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#63For others who were left scratching their heads at what exactly this pop-sci-explained PoolCounter mechanism actually is: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/PoolCounter TL;DR: It's a limiter on how many workers start rendering the new page version when the old page version in cache has been invalidated.
Yeah, I am the engineer mentioned in the article, and I agree the explanation doesn't really work. The pieces of the explanation that ended up in the article itself don't add up to a coherent explanation. The fault for that is mostly mine. In hindsight, my original explanation was too long and too elaborate to be helpful. It's a good reminder that it is easy to go to far with an analogy and end up complicating the th…
Hi. Do you think the performance of Wikipedia during this period would be improved if you had no ego? I think it would. Without an ego, a more optimal solution would result from multiple cycles of self-refutation.
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#64I don't think WMF staff are credited enough for the work they do in keeping Wikipedia running. They seriously know how to scale, I think the only ones better than them are honestly Facebook and Twitter!
Google as well?
You know, Google are so much in my life I don't even notice them!
Google beats everyone :-) they are so far ahead that I didn't even consider mentioning them!
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
Across a cluster of varnishes? I think that limit is per varnish.
No, definitely not across a cluster (although that would be quite nifty). Even on a single node that would reduce the thundering herd effect substantially.
Maybe that's a new feature request!
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
+1 for whoever named it the "Michael Jackson problem". I'm going to start using that if I ever encounter the same issue myself.
Is this not the thundering herd problem?
As I understand it yes, but I think the "Micheal Jackson problem" is a better name.
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#67Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, I am the engineer mentioned in the article, and I agree the explanation doesn't really work. The pieces of the explanation that ended up in the article itself don't add up to a coherent explanation. The fault for that is mostly mine. In hindsight, my original explanation was too long and too elaborate to be helpful. It's a good reminder that it is easy to go to far with an analogy and end up complicating the th…
Basically a page view checks the cache and rebuilds if necessary. Thousands of page hits in the same second before the build is over starts thousands of parallel rebuilds.
Also known as the thundering herd...
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
They cache the bejeezus out of their pages. Problems come up when a lot of people want to edit a page, an inherently uncacheable operation.
It's possible to use stacks to 'cache' writes in scenarios like this. Writes to the same object go in the same stack, iterate over stacks, pop the first item, write it, clear the stack. It works miracles for ephemeral data like wikipedia edits. If you have extremely spikey load on servers, stacks are also a great replacement for queues, admit that during the deluge some portion of queries will timeout and go unanswer…
Doesn't caching writes from multiple different servers potentially cause consistency and durability concerns?
I know MongoDB still haven't marked the bug [1] reported by Kyle Kingsbury [2] that found stale reads on all consistency and write concern levels...
1. https://jira.mongodb.org/plugins/servlet/mobile#issue/SERVER...
Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
> during a moment of loss of one of humanity's greats. Compared to, lets say Bill Gates who's saved millions of lives? Even artistically, I'm not sure Prince was up there in the top 1% The power of marketing.....
I totally agree with the sentiment of this comment (though I'm not sure how much marketing is involved.) Prince was very good at music and was, well, kind of a dick. I don't quite get the massive outpouring of grief that has ensued.
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Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Basically a page view checks the cache and rebuilds if necessary. Thousands of page hits in the same second before the build is over starts thousands of parallel rebuilds.
Also known as the thundering herd...
Yeah I never really solved it while I was using memcached but I'm not Wikipedia