On Tue, 2003-03-18 at 08:19, Thomas Corell wrote:
For example: one important thing (IMHO) for Wikipedia is the speed of a database request. In the voting and in the discussion about the Article count nobody calculated the complexity of some of the options. I think some of the admins will refuse methods for this count which will need a lot of performance. And I would respect such a decision.
The live article count is maintained on an action-by-action basis. That is, there's a stats table in the database that keeps track of a couple of numbers, including the article count. When an article is created, deleted, or modified, the software compares the previous text (if any) with the new text (if any) and either increments or decrements the counter if appropriate. Displaying the counter is simply a matter of fetching one number from a table.
So there's really not much database impact; some of the ideas about number of revisions or number of people editing would require a check of the database for the article's history, but only individually as part of the process of changing an article (and it'd be a drop in the bucket between updating link tables and whatnot!)
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)