[Toolserver-l] Stable server, a few questions

[Delphine Ménard]

Hi there,

on the stable toolserver project page, I read:

"There are a number of important, well liked, and widely used tools on
the toolserver systems. Currently the toolserver serves well over 1
million http requests per day to over 65,000 distinct IPs per day and
there are a number of non-http based tools as well. The 3 to 4 most
popular tools account for roughly 3/4 of the http requests."
(http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolserver/Stable_server)

In short, it shows that the toolserver and the tools hosted by it
*are* important to the community (and maybe the readers out there, I
can't figure out, really).

I have a few questions about this:
1) do we know what tools are the most used (and hence would actually
make most sense to migrate to a stable toolserver)
2) Can we, from the above list, also say which tools are the most
useful (ie. without which some projects would just break, I am
especially thinking Commons here)
3) Do I undersand this right in saying that a "stable" toolserver
would mean a way of actually integrating for real those tools into our
daily operational monitoring (ie. it *must* work, just like the
websites must be up)?
4) Has anyone actually made any kind of a budget concerning what kind
of machine we'd need, what the cost of  maintenance would be, if we
want to make sure there is some sysadmin time devoted to it (ie. a
real full cost things about this).

My underlying idea is the following. There are many organisations out
there, Wikimedia Chapters and other friends of Wikimedia, who would
definitely finance something like a stable toolserver, all the more if
it is proven that it is essential to the Wikimedia projects [*].

So I would really urge those who are developping and maintaining tools
that are useful and widely used to express their interest and help
build this project so that it is "sellable" to entities ready to help
us with making it happen.

Cheers,

Delphine

*for example, in all POV fashion, I am not sure that an edit counter"
is *essential* to the Wikimedia projects, although it's good tool and
might be an important asset to the development of the community. On
the other hand, I am convinced that "check usage" is essential for the
Wikimedia projects on a wide scale.
-----
Delphine Ménard
Chapters coordinator
Wikimedia Foundation
dmenard[at]wikimedia[punto]org