Matthew Woodcraft wrote:
If the limiting factor on Wikipedia's growth is people's tolerance for slow edits, the effect of faster hardware will be more activity (which is great), but not a faster user experience after things have settled down.
Well, what I hope we can do is stay one step ahead of the growth in the future -- something that we haven't done so well in the past.
It is my belief that the next round of upgrades, i.e. the big Opteron server for $6,000 that we will buy once contributions reach a high enough level, will give us around 10x our October 1st capacity. That's substantial, and we'll take a while to outgrow that. And in the meantime, we'll be constantly raising money to stay ahead of the curve.
I've been doing an informal survey of the "big foundations" to try to find programs that would support us. It seems likely that such an approach will be successful, and of course anyone with connections is invited to help me with that!
--Jimbo