Lars Aronsson wrote:
What does matter is how the Foundation selects which
products and
features to use on the Foundation's own servers. This is really
not a development issue, but one of operations. This is where the
5-15 seconds response times of 2002-2003 were a real failure, that
caused real damage to the project, as editors were leaving, or at
least unable to convince their friends to join the project. New
features were taken into use as soon as they were developed, and
nobody seemed to monitor the performance. Every enthusiastic
developer could introduce new bottlenecks.
If Wikipedia had had a board in 2002-2003, it could have appointed
an "editor satisfaction officer" or a "productivity officer", with
responsibility to question the editor community what slowed them
down, and how productivity could be improved. I believe many
editors would have put the blame on the slow response times.
In 2003 the problem was lack of hardware. We disabled every
non-essential feature: just about every query page, search, even
watchlists at times. A number of innovative performance features were
developed, which kept our backs off the wall. We would have been better
off at that time with a financing officer than a productivity officer.
-- Tim Starling