On 11-03-14 03:05 PM, Tim Starling wrote:
> On 15/03/11 02:44, William Allen Simpson wrote:
>> Thanks for responding.  I hoping to help track down the reason we're
>> getting so many Proxy Errors, but sadly this was a general problem.
>>
>> Don't know what a "MJ issue in the long tail" means?
> Well, an "MJ issue" is a special kind of performance problem that
> affects very popular pages, like how popular the [[Michael Jackson]]
> article was in the few hours after his death. See wikitech-l from
> around that date. The "long tail" is a buzzword referring to the
> low-frequency end of a Zipf distribution, i.e. the least popular
> articles. So it's hard to see how an MJ issue could be in the long
> tail. I think he just means an MJ issue.
>
> -- Tim Starling
There's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_Tail -- ;) and yes I understand the 
irony of quoting Wikipedia in a discussion about WP on wikitech.

I think he might mean that invalidating the cache of a large number of 
semi-popular long tail pages (being the long numper pages we serve less hits 
to, but hit a similar volume of traffic to a page like MW's when you add all of 
them together) at the same time could create a similar performance issue to the 
invalidation of a single extremely article article like MJ was. Simply because 
we're invalidating a number of not top-## pages, but popular enough that the 
total number of people viewing the collection of pages gets close to the 
traffic one MJ-popular article gets.

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]



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