Is Wikipedia slow?

One Wikipedia surface: the www.wikipedia.org language portal, about 120 KB of HTML that Wikimedia serves from its own cache servers rather than from a commercial CDN. It is the front door a reader types before choosing a language, and it changes rarely, so nearly every request should be a cache hit; the number is close to the cost of reaching Wikimedia's nearest site and pulling 120 KB back. It does not stand for an article page, which is larger, sometimes uncached and served by a language edition, or for search or editing. The Wikipedia REST API has a separate report.

Between 27 September and 10 October 2026 the typical time was 14 ms in Amsterdam and 16 ms in Singapore, 84 ms in Montreal, and 324 ms in Mumbai, 388 ms in San Francisco and 427 ms in Tokyo. The three slow cities were slow on every daily run: San Francisco's median stayed between 374 and 434 ms, Tokyo's between 383 and 480 ms and Mumbai's between 311 and 345 ms. From outside we cannot see how Wikimedia steers each request to one of its sites, but the address each city connected to and how long the connection took together suggest where that site is. Tokyo and Mumbai connected to the address Singapore used, 58 to 79 ms away, which matches the distance to Wikimedia's Singapore site, the nearest it has to either city. San Francisco is the odd one: Wikimedia operates a caching site there, yet our San Francisco worker connected to the address Montreal used, with a 70 ms connection time that suggests the US East Coast. We cannot say from outside whether that routing is Wikimedia's choice, our worker's network provider or something in between; a reader in San Francisco on another network may see a very different number. No city had a bad day; the slowest run for San Francisco, Tokyo and Mumbai was the last one, on 10 October, at 434, 480 and 345 ms. The Google homepage is the other reference site in this set.