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Huge Traffic On Wikipedia's Non-Profit Budget
miller60 writes "'As a non-profit running one of the world's busiest web destinations, Wikipedia provides an unusual case study of a high-performance site. In an era when Google and Microsoft can spend $500 million on one of their global data center projects, Wikipedia's infrastructure runs on fewer than 300 servers housed in a single data center in Tampa, Fla.' Domas Mituzas of MySQL/Sun gave a presentation Monday at the Velocity conference that provided an inside look at the technology behind Wikipedia, which he calls an 'operations underdog.'"
Except there's not. There's data centers in Europe and Asia, too, including one at some Yahoo facilities - at least on this note, the article (or summary) is utterly wrong. Single datacenter? No.
Sure they do without ad income. But they also do it without having to pay salaries, or co location fees, or bandwidth costs... (I know they pay some of those, but they also get a metric buttload of contributions in kind.)
When your costs are lower, and your standard of service (and content) malleable, it is easy to live on a smaller income.
A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that.
Banks don't require "six nines"; banks require that no data (data being money), once committed, get lost. The "nines" rating refers to the percentage of time a system is online, working, and available to its users. It does not refer to the percentage of acceptable data loss. It is acceptable for bank systems to have downtime, scheduled maintenance, or "closing periods" -- all of these eat into a "nines" rating, none of which lead to data loss.They're not all in Tampa, they have a bunch in Netherlands and a few more in South Korea.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I covered most of Wikipedia technology bits at my previous year MySQL Conference presentation: http://dammit.lt/uc/workbook2007.pdf (thats quite detailed report)
No, actually - the Wikimedia servers serve all Wikimedia projects (all the Wikipedias, Wikimedia Commons, all the other projects), but Uncyclopedia is part of Wikia, which is a private company owned by Jimmy Wales to do wikis and isn't actually linked to the Wikimedia Foundation in any way.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Single database, though. All the databases for all the projects are in Tampa - one master for English Wikipedia and two for all the other 700+ Wikimedia projects.
(They tried running the databases for Asian languages from the Yahoo!-sponsored datacentre in Seoul for a while, but it didn't actually work much faster than it did with everything in Tampa.)
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Wikipedia's pretty impressive, but how about the Internet Archive? Also a non-profit that doesn't run ads, and not only do they, like Google and Yahoo, "download the Internet" on a regular basis, but the Archive makes backups! Plus, they have huge amounts of streaming audio and video (pd or creative-commons). The first time I ever heard the word "Petabyte" being discussed in practical, real world terms (as in, "we're taking delivery next month") was in connection with the Internet Archive. Several years ago. And it was being used in the plural! :)
They may not have as much incoming traffic as Wikipedia, but the sheer volume of data they manage is truly staggering. (Heck, they have multiple copies of Wikipedia!) When I do download something from there, it's typically in the 80-150 MB range, and 1 or 2 GB in a pop isn't unusual, and I know I'm not the only one downloading, so their bandwidth bills must still be pretty impressive.
The fact that these two sites manage to survive and thrive the way they do never ceases to amaze me.
Stop Computers/Cars Analogies on S