With moves afoot to provide Wikinewsies with professional press identity cards, improving the site has become a matter of urgency. But, a highly frustrating one at that.
For any website, one of the most important things is how quickly it loads. wikinewsie.org has not been faring well in that department – apart from the 100% static pages, or those including a bare-minimum of generated content. Frequently, page loading was giving timeout errors, and the cause was impossible to pin down.
After wasting an age looking into caching code and content, swearing profusely at the load-times whenever I made a change, and finding a bug in Godaddy’s MediaWiki installer, I took up the latter with technical support.
Round, and round
I’d previously emailed support when a couple of my submissions via their MediaWiki installer failed to ever complete. Eventually, I’d given up on that when a “higher” level of support ‘fixed’ a failed install and gave no indication what had actually gone wrong. My best-guess is that when you set the password for a new install, you can’t use the “£” character — although, they don’t list it as forbidden.
I finally got really annoyed at a double-slash where it didn’t belong in page addresses. To-date, I’d had two useless responses from tech support. And, I mean really useless responses. First, blame me (naturally) — but qualify that with ‘it might be the package‘. It isn’t; the problem lies with Godaddy’s installer.
In my second email to support, I highlighted this, including a cite from the MediaWiki manual – specifically, the entry on what to put in for the name of the server it’s running on.
This was ignored. I’d given the agent an easier out — I’d grumbled about the pathetic response-times in serving up pages as well as actually telling them something they were doing is wrong.
So, I got the “two-clicks and he’s done” on how to tune a MySQL database. Way to go Ryan P., Online Support Representative! That’ll keep your average handle time down.
I nearly gave up on the couldn’t-care-less vibe from my few interactions with support, but the performance issue caught my attention. When a couple of other site users reported timeouts, and I kept getting HTTP 500 Server Error responses, it was time to look at that performance issue for myself. I logged into the server, and started poking around.
Use of top: Permission denied. To cut a long story short, I hacked together a script to parse the list of processes output by ps. Here’s a screenshot of that in-action:
Yes, that really is only 0.3% ‘free’ CPU (the server has 4 processors).
I went a bit “ballistic” at support when I emailed them this output. But, it simply seemed they had never bothered to inform me that I was able to switch to a more modern form of hosting at no extra cost.
Move done, things have improved — although I am inclined to say I’ve seen more responsive MediaWiki installs with other companies.
Longer-term, wikinewsie.org has to move outside the United States. It may pain some of our accredited reporters who hope the U.S. will live up to the “Land of the Free” motto, but both Sweden and the Netherlands are more-respected in terms of press freedoms.
On that point, I would like to invite you to contribute to our running costs; not only would wikinewsie.org be better-off were it to move elsewhere, but the entire site should be secure (using an https:// connection). On Godaddy, your donation of £1.50 pays for around a week’s-worth of hosting, or email account provision. But, just having an SSL certificate for the full site is over £5 per week. If you don’t understand why we should move to https, then I cannot recommend enough reading what the EFF has to say on the subject.
[For those of you more-used to dollars, £5 usually fluctuates between $7.60 and $8.00.]
