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Huge Traffic On Wikipedia's Non-Profit Budget

Posted by timothy on from the optimizing-smartitude dept.

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.'"

4 of 240 comments (clear)

  1. More importantly by wolf12886 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Off-topic, I know, but...what about /.'s hardware? by kiwimate · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Simplicity by wsanders · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?"
  4. Wikipedia = much more traffic than slashdot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.