Wikipedia Outage

Thought the same thing. Finding the root cause is easier when you don't have to debug dozens of abstraction layers (KVM, Containerd/Docker, Kubernetes, etc).

You’re implying serious and useful work can be done in a stable tech stack? Preposterous.

Seriously though, not a fan of php at all but the js tooling is rocket science in comparison.

5 internal microservices? I thought the Supercharged™ had deployed 256 microservices last week alone.

I doubt anyone at HN takes Gartner seriously, as James Plamondon (Microsoft) wrote:

> Analysts sell out - that's their business model. But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.

The question is, who is gullible enough to still believe Gartner has any value? You'd think by now even the most clueless of MBAs would have caught on.

Indeed, I'd rather have a single version of a truth most people can agree on, rather than thousands of bubbles each spewing their own agenda.

there is vastly more (and ever exploding) knowledge than what the current wikipedia model can integrate (talking always about public knowledge).

Unless there is a breakthrough in how the open source ecosystem integrates, validates, federates public knowledge somebody else will claim that they can better "organize the world's information" (using, e.g "AI") and we will probably not like the new state of the world.

I think there is substantial value in preventing that outcome from happening. NB: I use the term decentralization not just a technical database/server architecture but also as a means of engaging far more resources.

thats a strange assertion when the internet was famously invented to eliminate complex failure modes. Quoting from "DARPA and the Internet Revolution" By Mitch Waldrop [0]

"Finally, Roberts decided to make the network completely decentralized, with no one master computer responsible for sorting the packets and routing them to their destination. Such a Grand Central Station approach would have been much simpler to implement, Roberts knew. But one blown transistor could have taken the whole network down.

So instead, he decreed that the ARPA sites would be linked in a complex pattern rather like the Interstate highway map, and that each site would share the routing responsibilities equally. That is, the computer there would read the digital address on each packet as it came in, accept that packet if the address was local, or else send it off again on the next stage of its journey.

This “packet-switching” approach would mean more complexity and more programming during the set-up phase. But the final system would be far more robust: No one failure could bring it down."

[0] https://www.darpa.mil/about-us/timeline/modern-internet

That’s what my setup is running off of, just a kiwix-serve command pointed at a folder of .zim files and exposed through nginx.

I have a write-up of the technical details as well: https://ounapuu.ee/posts/2021/12/09/self-hosting-wikipedia/

Not sure about the edits, but the title of the requests graph including "Varnish frontend CDN" and the query ("job_method_status:varnish_requests...") imply to me that those are the requests from a frontend cache (Varnish) or series of caches to the backend, rather than all requests.

(I'm not 100% sure you intended to suggest Wikipedia only gets 100k requests/s, I just thought it was an interesting discussion point.)

Indeed. I not only find it impressive how honest it is (as opposed to others[1]) but also how quickly they resolved the event.

[1] - https://ably.com/blog/honest-status-reporting-aws-service

The incident took ten minutes to resolve. What's the point of immediately rushing to HN whenever a large website is transiently down?

It switched from a charity-like operation, with barebones staffing and incredible benefits for users per dollar spent, to a 'splash the cash and hope' strategy.

I personally don't want my money spent like that, so I don't donate.