Last modified: 2009-07-24 14:13:10 UTC
when a dberror occurs on enwiki (almost invariably the "lock wait timeout exceeded" error), the message that displays is the default english version; despite the fact that the message has been customised on enwiki. The customised version is not overriding the default message.
I wouldn't be surprised that customised version cannot be fetched from database when there is database error. On the other hand aren't these stored memory?
Well the lock-wait-timeout has got nothing to do with the slaves, it's just a traffic jam on the master. It should still be possible to read stuff if necessary: it manages to render the rest of the skin ok. Of course, that might not be the case on systems with a single database, but even then, as you say, the message should be memcached.
I'm pretty sure we deliberately don't use the site-customized messages in the DB error since by definition if our DB access is broken it may not be safe to pull from the DB. You don't necessarily know what the problem was or what further attempts to access the backend might cause. Probably not worth the effort of poking at it, but we can LATER it for prettification.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 398 ***
