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Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the big-whoop dept.

Edit This Page writes "Jimmy Wales announced today that Yahoo! has ordered 23 HP servers for the Wikimedia Foundation. The three database servers are model DL 385, and will come with dual Athlons, 8GB of RAM, and 6x 146GB 15K RPM drives each. They will also provide rackspace and bandwidth. The announcement comes four months after Google's announcement of support, and two months after Yahoo's own. Google has not yet made their intentions clear. You can read more about the specifications of what will soon be a 100+ server cluster at the Wikimedia Servers wiki article."

4 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. Also! by Raul654 · · Score: 5, Informative

    As I write this, our developers are switiching the entire site over to Mediawiki 1.5 (from 1.4), and most of the changes will make it run faster. So we're lowering the per-transaction cost of the software and increasing the server capacity -- this is a good thing.

    --


    To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
    --E.C. Stanton
    1. Re:Also! by Jon+Chatow · · Score: 5, Informative
      Because the devs and the sysadmins are one and the same (generally), and they like playing fire with fire. :-)

      Seriously, "not recommended" is because it hasn't been properly tested yet in a large-scale environment; this is what is being done right now. If this version of MediaWiki works for Wikimedia, it should work for everyone else, too (barring the funny odd bits we don't use).

      --
      James F.
  2. Re:required? by xMilkmanDanx · · Score: 5, Informative

    Just think of all the links that get posted in slashdot to wikipedia and it doesn't falter under the load. That and it's not just static pages, between building, rebuilding, keeping reversion history, indexing for searches and constant slashdotting...

    --
    I am not in anyway affiliated with Max Cannon
  3. Re:required? by Jon+Chatow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Actually, no, bandwidth (I'll assume here that you meant "throughput" ;-)) problems are not significant, it's much more the actual server hardware. Wikis are very database- and CPU-heavy.

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    James F.