November 2005 image server

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The new image server has been installed!

Images should now load much faster than before in most cases. Uploads are now available again.



Overview[edit]

You may have noticed that images have been very slow to load, particularly over the last few weeks. All of the uploaded images and other submitted files for Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, and our other sites go through a central image file server which has become heavily overloaded this year.

In the last couple of months we've moved some of the files around to other servers to ease the pressure, but the biggest improvement should be coming today (21/22 November 2005).

We've recently acquired and set up a new fileserver, 'amane', to replace the old overloaded server 'albert'. Its disk array is larger and much faster, which should greatly improve performance.

Uploads and the upload.wikimedia.org web server may be disabled temporarily to speed up the process of moving things to the new server; sorry for any inconvenience. (Now reenabled. --brion 22:52, 22 November 2005 (UTC))[reply]

Details[edit]

The following configuration changes will be made:

  • Move en.wikipedia.org image files from khaldun to amane
  • Move commons.wikimedia.org image files from bacon to amane
  • Move other image files from albert to amane
  • Switch upload.wikimedia.org web server duties from albert+apache2 to amane+lighttpd
    • Keep khaldun and bacon available as backup, see if splitting or caching is necessary for now

Notice to translators with sysop permissions[edit]

Edit your wiki's MediaWiki:Sitenotice to override the global version of the site notice message with a localized translation.