Last modified: 2012-08-23 18:04:32 UTC
Since around half a year there are significant differences in loading and saving times in different language versions for pages with a lot of flagicons. In the English wikipedia, all things are working well. Opening/saving a version of the same page in the German wikipedia, the loading and saving times are much longer (often more than 30 seconds). Often the saving process finishes with an error message. The comparison of pages in the version history is in the German Wikipedia for such pages nearly impossible. Example: [[:de:Swiss Open (Badminton)]] - loading time of the page 30 seconds; [[:en:Swiss Open (badminton)]] - loading time of the page 2 seconds; A similar page without flagicons loads within a second, example [[:de:(Schweizer Meisterschaft (Badminton)]]. Another example: [[:de:Scottish Open (Badminton)]] - loading time of the page 110 seconds; [[:en:List of Scottish Open champions in badminton]] - 2 seconds After editing the German version of the page Scottish Open (Badminton), the saving process takes around 45 seconds and finishes with an error message: Our servers are currently experiencing a technical problem. This is probably temporary and should be fixed soon. Please try again in a few minutes. You may be able to get further information in the #wikipedia channel on the Freenode IRC network. The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate. If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below. Request: POST http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scottish_Open_(Badminton)&action=submit, from 91.198.174.45 via amssq31.esams.wikimedia.org (squid/2.7.STABLE7) to 208.80.152.70 (208.80.152.70) Error: ERR_READ_TIMEOUT, errno [No Error] at Fri, 02 Jul 2010 08:56:39 GMT
Works for me now. I see that a general-purpose template was used and had hundreds of calls like {{flagicon|England}}, each of them probably trigger a huge switch. So this looks like a standard template performance problem as for the cite templates. This should be fixed in general by [[mw:Lua scripting]].
