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Yahoo! Orders Wikipedia Hardware
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."
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
Wikipedia Hardware?! I didn't know they make hardware. Does anyone have the Wikipedia link for this? ;)
So it seems now that Wikipedia has more street cred than either Yahoo OR Google, since they're both clammering to be seen as being in support.
And with Google at aproximately 211 street cred units as of the last survey, Wikipedia is definitely doing well.
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
The trouble of course with wiki-hardware is that the system adminstration is left to the community.
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
All Google has done is hand-waving so far.
On the other hand, Yahoo has been one of the earliest Wikipedia supporters according to TFA.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
Not Athlon
Only on Slashdot would Yahoo's donation be compared unfavorably to Google, when Yahoo has actually provided something, and Google has merely mentioned it.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
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.
James F.
'Cos Yahoo! offered to host them at their facility there, and our overall global reach has a bit of a paucity in Asia.
James F.
Theres nothing wrong with hand-waving.
Obi-wan did ok by it.
liqbase
The server hardware spec link said the "athlons" in fact are opterons. *sigh*
I have a really elegant proof for Fermat's last theorem. If this sig was only a bit longer...
This is sort of like those school yard spats over a girl.
Wiki is the girl. Google and Yahoo are the two guys.
My mother's advice surely applies to this situation(that I got many years back):
"Stay away from that little trollop! Anyone that causes a fight is not worth it."
Of course, I did hang round that girl. Pretty wee thing. It was all fruitles of course.
Bitch! You whore Wiki!
*begins to cry*
In post Patriot Act America, the library books scan you.
If Yahoo is a "me too" move, Google was a "look how good we are" move.
Regardless, it's good for not only the administrators, but obviously for their large user base too.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Have you looked at the MediaWiki features? There's tons of dynamic features. What doesn't hit he cache, goes to the DB. Wikipedia is 67th in the Alexa ratings (Slashdot is 1,441th, of course not too many slashdotters use Alexa, but check some of the other sites, CNN is in the 20s, and Wikipedia gets more traffic in a day than /. gets in a month).
Additionally, Wikipedia's lag is a dampening factor to its popularity. As more servers are added, it becomes more responsive, servers go to capacity again, and yet more hardware is needed.
Because only old people will administer the servers.
Seems to be a war to be the best "opensource" helper. See Google wants to help wikipedia, Yahoo helps wikipedia, Google makes Google summer code ...
;-) ?
What's next
Bonjour !
According to Netcraft, /. is ranked 33, while Wikipedia is ranked 117.
This sig is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.
True, but think about it, what is the truth for non technical things?
Before wiki and the 'net in general made content become alive, and coming from whatever source, all such discussions were lost. The winner of the argument, or more likely, the one with the arguments that were more pleasing for the ones in charge, would win and get published and later become part of what is taught in schools.
With wikipedia the argument is part of the content and being critic of what you read is a good exercise for the mind.
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
RTFA - it is the Wikipedia guys who are holding up Google's donation, not Google:
"Wikimedia's planned facilities in Amsterdam (The Netherlands), Belgium, and Asia are not online yet, so it would be premature at this juncture to ask Google for something specific when we don't yet have good technical knowledge of what we will need in the coming months following the introduction of these new facilities. Google are eager to help us, and Wikimedia are eager to accept their help, but the Board want to be good stewards of donor money, and this requires them to move carefully"
I'm wondering about setting up a network of boxes running the Coral software. Those have built in fault tolerance so it wouldn't take lots of admin work and would allow accepting many small bandwidth offers, in countries with comparatively low traffic. Makes most content even closer to the end users and spreads the bandwidth load around. Nothing actually happening on this front yet, though.
A very large number of places witih full database servers and page builders, like this Yahoo announcement, would have too much admin overhead - 3-6 of those places is about right.
P2P is a security problem. People can always modify P2P programs to add nasty content and Wikipedia has already seen people trying to upload that and has filters in place to catch and block some things.
Both Yahoo and Google deserve approximately equal kudos for being helpful to the projects. Thanks!
I saw a presentation by Jimbo Wales in which he compared the readership of Wikipedia, Slashdot, and NYTimes.com. Wikipedia recently passed NYTimes, and slashdot doesn't even compare. In fact, he noted with something of a smile that Wikipedia would probably bring Slashdot to its knees with a front-page link.
Slashdot ain't got squat on Wikipedia.
This is a classic case of considering the hardware to be the problem rather than the software. The software has serious issues when it comes to performance and the developers are very slow to address it. Hell, Tim Starling, a lead developer, even stated that one of the design goals of the MediaWiki software was to spend as little time as possible developing it. I kid you not, that's paraphrasing something (with NO exaggeration) that was said in a presentation document which I can find if anyone doesn't believe me.
I've heard some whining from some of the developers because they didn't have a ready made solution for certain things, meaning they would have to put actual *effort* into making their own. The idea of writing glue code (to C code) to make up for a feature lacking in existing php libraries was considered an abhorrent thing.
Their best response to me pointing out flaws in their "development philosophy" was to them retort with the oh-so-clever "well why don't you write something better yourself?" Of course, that phrase is just a code word for "we know it sucks and we're just not willing to put all the extra effort into rewriting major portions of it." Really, it's sad when you have to define your software in terms of someone else (your opponent specifically) not writing something better.
This isn't just unfounded complaints either. The developers have often complained that the existing implementation (and especially the choice to write the original code in PHP) needs to be rid of. They've said it has "everything and the kitchen sink" and that it degrades performance, but aren't trying that hard to get rid of it. They know this as a matter of fact through testing--Mediawiki has a massive overhead in setup time compared to other wiki software.
Not just that, but the Wikipedia admins are all volunteers and aren't exactly the cream of the crop. They took them as volunteers since they were the best ones to devote that much time to it and unfortunately that means they're mediocre and they REALLY are not experienced for such a high traffic website.
If they actually had a paid full time admin who had considerable background in sites like this, you'd suddenly see a massive drop in down time and other problems.
That's a Wikipedia server admin that's speaking.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.