Occasion: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PermaLink/143840984
Server answer
503 Service Temporarily Unavailable
No cache server id, no system version, no details.
Observed since 2016-05-29.
Statistics
- Source text size: 1,175,164 bytes
- Number of internal links: 45,445
- Length of all link titles: 993,384 bytes
- Estimated size of generated HTML document: 4.5 MB
- An internal link [[2Long]] leads to
- <a href="/wiki/2Long" title="2Long">2Long</a>
- 4 bytes for brackets are expanded to 30, adding 1,181,570 bytes for HTML markup.
- Link title is occurring 3 times, adding further 1,986,768 bytes.
- An internal link [[2Long]] leads to
- There is a limit for template expansion, but not for plain wikitext expansion.
- E.g. tables and images result in larger HTML code.
- Diff page still works (7.8 MB)
- &action=raw available
- Obviously parsing broke some server bounds without being caught.
- This user page is entirely useless, the user is no longer active.
Avoid delivery of oversized HTML responses
Users might be connected by a slow or expensive network. Remaining data volume for the last week of this month may be less than 100 MB.
Users should not be surprised by a very large page. Wikitext after template expansion is limited to some 2 MB, and generated HTML of content area should be limited to a reasonable size based upon wikitext limit, e.g. 3 MB. Some 200 kB will be added for framework anyway, used for portal navigation and resource updating communication. Thumbnail images will be transferred, too.
When rendered content limit has been exceeded,
- the entire content should be discarded.
- A brief red system message should be displayed instead.
- Keep It Shorter, Stupid.
- Page should throw a maintenance category, as already when hitting template expansion size.
This goes for parsed content. Other pages, like diff page or &action=raw or requests for many many external links, multimedia etc. are not subject to a parsing limitation.
It might be possible to show 40,000 images on a page without exceeding 2 MB wikitext size. There should be a limit of some 1000 different embedded <img> requested for download.
I recollect that similar issues have been discussed some five or ten years ago, and a $wg has been introduced already or a deliberate suggestion for $wg has been made, but I cannot find the old threads.