Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I don't care how few servers they have, whats more interesting to me is that they run an ultra-high traffic site, which they aren't having trouble paying for, and do it without adds.
I.e. the promised follow-up to this story about moving to the new Chicago datacenter? You know, the one where Mr. Taco promised a follow-up story "in a few days" about the "ridiculously overpowered new hardware".
I was quite looking forward to that, but it never eventuated, unless I missed it. It's certainly not filed under Topics->Slashdot.
The wiki software, MediaWiki, was written for Wikipedia and is licensed under the GPL ( http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_does_MediaWiki_work%3F. According to Wikipedia they use MySQL as their database and run it all on Linux servers.
Or do a hurricane dance, and let nature do its thing...
Having all their servers in Tampa, FL (of all places given hurricanes, frequent lightning, flooding, etc there) doesn't seem too smart - I would have thought, given Wikipedia's popularity, their servers would be geographically spread out in multiple locations.
Though to do that adds a level of complexity and costs that even many for-profit ventures, such as Slashdot, likely can't afford / justify; Slashdot's servers are in one place - Chicago ... to digress a bit, I notice this site's accessibility (ie. more page not found / timeouts lately) has been spotty since the servers move.
Ron
Although much of the Mediawiki software is a hideous twitching blob of PHP Hell, the base functionality is fairly simple and run perpetually and scale massively as long as you don't mess with it.
What spoils a lot of projects like this is the constant need for customization. Wikimedia essentially can't be customized (except for plugins obviously, which you install at your own peril) and that is a big reason why it scales so massively.
As for Wikipedia itself, I suspect it is massively weighted in favor of reads. That simplifies circumstances a lot.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Exactly. A bank requires "six nines" of performance (i.e., right 99.9999% of the time) and probably wants even better than that. Six nines works out to about 30 seconds of downtime per year.
It seems like Wikipedia is getting things right 99% of the time, or maybe even 99.9% of the time ("three nines"). That's a pretty low standard relative to how most companies do business.
Slashdot is great at taking down sites on crappy shared hosting, but anything with a decently configured dedicated server will likely survive just fine.
Wikipedia's probably getting hit with hundreds of times the traffic Slashdot is at all times.
Slashdot does .. what? 40 mbit of traffic at peak? Wikipedia
is roughly 100 times larger. (And WP has three datacenters, not one)
Slashdot traffic hasn't created noticeable blips on Wikipedia's radar for years.
OTOH, if Wikipedia linked slashdot on every page slashdot would go down, if do to nothing else but bandwidth exhaustion.
I don't actually know anything about the total computing power Google employs, but I do know that they will purchase on the order of 1,000-10,000 processors merely to evaluate them prior to making a real purchase.
The enemies of Democracy are