Wikia

Community Central

WatchlistRandom pageRecent changes
Comments21

Latest News From Wikia's Tech Team

DaNASCAT June 25, 2010
Przemek, Jason, and Socrat working hard to make Wikia faster!
DaNASCATAdded by DaNASCAT
Recently the Engineering Ops team has been doing some critical work in our San Jose data center to improve site speed and stability. Here's a little background into what they're doing and why.

What we are working onEdit

Last year, we completed the set-up of our Iowa data center as a backup facility, to ensure minimal disruption if the San Jose data center has an issue. While the machines in Iowa are brand new, it's clear the hardware in San Jose is beginning to age. So now we're installing brand new and top-of-the-line data servers in San Jose. To make sure there is minimal disruption to the site, some of our engineers from Poland are working with the team from San Francisco to install and configure these servers.

Upcoming downtimes and improvementsEdit

Some key servers will need moving and that may mean a few read only times as we reset machines. We always try to time these periods with the lowest traffic times of the day to avoid interrupting editing. We will announce read-only periods via talk page messages, Facebook and Twitter so you can stay informed. We may also have a few times when site load or logging in may be slower than usual. This will be mainly due to increased loads on the machines being kept online while others are taken offline during moves and swaps. Initial testing with the new web servers shows a decrease in overall page load times. Just as important, the addition of several lightning-fast database servers means our wikis are being stored and retrieved more efficiently.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment. We'll make sure your thoughts are passed along to the very tired Ops team.

Want to receive updates on the latest Staff blog posts? Then click here to follow this blog.

21 comments


You cannot add a comment to the article.

  • Ok

  • Hi, my wikia site in not searchable online now (but it was searchable first 2 days). What happened? Thank you

  • @Whiteguru @Launchballer We have fixed that issue. Thanks for the reports!

  • "Ah, now I understand why the preview window comes when saving in various answers wikias. OK, thanks for the heads up, will keep watching." It's happening in several non-Answers Wikis as well.

  • c'e qulcuno che parla italiano????????????

  • Oh is there going to be a San Jose data center report like: http://ganglia.wikia.net/iowa/

  • Looking forward to the improvements. Hopefully the reason this is happening is because Wikia is making lots of $$$! ;-)

  • Sounds like a much needed move. Yeah loading times have been slow at Ghostbusters Wiki and other wikis I edit at. Thought it was my laptop.

  • @Gourleyo where are you having problems?

  • Ah, now I understand why the preview window comes when saving in various answers wikias. OK, thanks for the heads up, will keep watching.

  • Cool thanks for the head up

  • Always nice to know about this things.

  • Wikia could sure do with a speed-up: "Average Load Time for Wikia.com

    Very Slow (5.328 Seconds), 91% of sites are faster." - Alexa.com

    That's not good for SEO.

  • How long should the read only things last for?

  • Can you please try and make it faster in the UK, as Wikia hasn't been working very well where I live recently.

  • So does this explain why some thumbnails have failed to appear during/after image upload over the last few days in the file upload dialog box ?. ?

  • You can check out our Iowa grid report here: http://ganglia.wikia.net/iowa/

  • @ pcj, hard to say. Unexpected things break, some things take longer than expected, etc., etc.. It's definitely something we anticipate being /nearly/ completed with by the end of next week.

    @ FabledArc, yeah, image upload has been a little touch-and-go as of late (we're working on improving thumbnail generation), so video is probably the same deal.

  • So I guess this is why the Space Channel 5 wikia has been having problems with videos being uploaded as of late. (If not, then I still have some searching to do.)

    Thanks for alerting us. Sounds like hard work ahead. Good luck guys, and keep focusing on the eventual result!

  • Ah, great. Thanks for the heads up though.

Latest Photos

Add a Photo
7,508photos on this wiki
See more >
Create blog post

Popular blog
posts

See more >

Around Wikia's network

Random Wiki