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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? ;)
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.