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The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

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Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#71

Post by hunter2_ »

atdt wrote: post #47
semi-extrinsic wrote: post #9

For 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…

+++ath0

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#72

Post by jsmthrowaway »

yuvipanda wrote: post #60
jsmthrowaway wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The C10k problem is absolutely not irrelevant, and certainly not because one page only saw 800rps during a worldwide event. Two things there: (1) 800rps TO THAT PAGE is the metric. The entire rest of Wikipedia was still getting traffic, and as an educated guess I would estimate raw traffic to be on the order of magnitude of 3-4krps (across editing and views). They are quite open with operations and if I weren't mobil…

https://grafana.wikimedia.org/dashboard/db/varnish-http-erro... (and grafana.wikimedia.org in general) have more stats. It stated '13.38 Million req/min), which I think is ~230,000 req/s

Ah. So my hunch was that the published number was what is making it through cache, and that's where my estimate comes from too. That sounds about what I'd expect for the cached side.

Nice find!

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#73

Post by cooper12 »

yeukhon wrote: post #26

They mentioned 5M views within 24 hours of Michael Jackson's death. With over 3B Internet users out there, I am actually a little surprised how small the spike was. Did they only count English Wikipedia? Even so I am quite surprised. I would expect 10-20M at least. Similarly, many young people like myself have never heard of Prince, I had to look him up to find out who he truly was.

They recently overhauled it, [0] but back then the pageviews [1] wouldn't count mobile users. You can see the old stats for Jackon's page here: http://stats.grok.se/en/200906/Michael%20Jackson. The actual number is 5,875,404 views within that day (in whichever time zone) and is for the English version of the article specifically.

[0]: https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/12/14/pageview-data-easily-a... [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Pageview_statistics

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#74

Post by kevan »

tgb wrote: post #38
jessriedel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes aren't punishment. Up/down votes indicate "this comment ought to be more/less prominent on the page". The sentence was somewhat ambiguous and your misunderstanding is understandable. But your comment is not useful to the discussion because most people understood and in any case it's tangential.

Okay honestly am I the only one who reads "in front of a hundred million people" and thinks it actually means he was in front of a hundred million people? I don't see it as an ambiguity, it's simply a wrong statement. I'm okay with people being uninterested in (and even downvoting) a correction, but I'm baffled that anyone could read the sentence as anything other than incorrect. I mean, they even describe the weathe…

I think they mentioned the weather because it's relevant to his reputation as a legendary live performer and it's part of a great story. [1] There's something almost magical about incredible live performances. I can't really describe it, but sometimes a show has the perfect mix of emotion and artistry and it's completely mesmerizing to be a part of, even as a spectator. Participating in that moment bonds millions of people together in a small way. Even if they have nothing else in common, they were able to experience that together. Prince's Superbowl performance was one of those moments.

[1] http://www.maxim.com/entertainment/prince-2007-super-bowl-pe...

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#75

Post by MrBra »

MrBra wrote: post #34
tgb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, I can see where you're coming from but the sentence was "raining downpour in front of over a hundred million people." How does that NOT imply a live audience of a hundred million? I can't believe people are downvoting me for this. The sentence is absurd as written.

Maybe because it's not the best time to nitpick about that?

ahah, always keep a scientist mind, right? that's why you downvoted :D keep it up, scientist :)

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#76

Post by techdragon »

gerry_shaw wrote: post #66
encoderer wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this not the thundering herd problem?

As I understand it yes, but I think the "Micheal Jackson problem" is a better name.

It's a cute name but there is existing Research that relates to this issue which calls it "the thundering herd problem" so I would recommend the one you can actually search for without problems.

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#77

Post by michaelmrose »

quaristice wrote: post #57
ams6110 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Kind of a dick" I think could easily apply to Gates as well, no?

Well, I wasn't really responding to the Bill Gates part in particular. Gates was a bit of a megalomaniac with MS. But he's doing awesome stuff with the money now. As person I'm not aware of him ever being a jerk.

So if you gain lots of money via semi nefarious means what fraction do you have to dedicate to good works before the earlier wrong is cancelled?

I know that he didn't gas 6 million people but letting people buy their way out of moral debt with a fraction of the money they gained still seems horribly repugnant.

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#78

Post by nymi »

JBReefer wrote: post #3

This is so impressive, to see behind the curtains of what has become the central repository of humanities knowledge, during a moment of loss of one of humanity's greats.

Take note Robots at Facebook and Google. Monetizing humanities information through ads is not the only way.

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#79

Post by PhasmaFelis »

tgb wrote: post #38
jessriedel wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Downvotes aren't punishment. Up/down votes indicate "this comment ought to be more/less prominent on the page". The sentence was somewhat ambiguous and your misunderstanding is understandable. But your comment is not useful to the discussion because most people understood and in any case it's tangential.

Okay honestly am I the only one who reads "in front of a hundred million people" and thinks it actually means he was in front of a hundred million people? I don't see it as an ambiguity, it's simply a wrong statement. I'm okay with people being uninterested in (and even downvoting) a correction, but I'm baffled that anyone could read the sentence as anything other than incorrect. I mean, they even describe the weathe…

It's a poorly written sentence, but it's also fairly clear what they meant to say. It's polite to give people the benefit of the doubt.

Re: The impact of Prince’s death on Wikipedia

#80

Post by seanp2k2 »

Washuu wrote: post #36
zappo2938 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can't caching a page with varnish and memcache handle this?

Varnish does handle the mass of logged out cached requests. However, because they were having such a high amount of page edits per second the cache in Varnish would only by valid for about a second. Then a flood of logged out users hit the servers at the same requesting the uncached page to be rendered. The PoolCounter extensions keeps the web servers under control and by throttling requests for page rendering.

Why not just set the min TTL to a few minutes, or even a minute, for anonymous users? Is there enough usefulness in ~seconds of delay on article edits vs minutes to warrant a much more complex design?
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