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)