Opps! I sent this message to WikiEN-l by mistake. Sorry.

Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be on a seperate server than the English one, so we wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive English-language traffic killing us?

Chuck

But the current slowdown was caused by a fr.wiki sysop running a, uh, less than optimized sql command. ;-) If there were such a separation then only en.wiki would have been up during that time and we would probably have a flood of angry emails in a variety of languages complaining about being "singled-out". It is far better to keep the databases together, have the webserver on its own powerful box, and then have the mailing lists on a cheapo 500 MHz Linux box (which I can borg together and donate if needed - but I'm sure somebody else could donate an even better box).

Another server is going to be up soon but this is only a short term solution given how fast we are growing. Mid to long term we need to set-up the Wikimedia Foundation so that we'll have a legal entity to accept tax-deductable donations and receive grants.

Then we can start to build a really fast server cluster with 1GB Ethernet and if needed even start to pay Jimbo his cost for bandwidth. I hear bandwidth is pretty cheap for ISPs who buy it in bulk (like Jimbo) but is kinda expensive for ISP customers - the last thing we want is to be just another ISP customer so we shouldn't expect Jimbo to pay all our bills in full forever (we need to prevent taking Jimbo for granted - paying him back his monthly out-of-pocket cost only seems fair once we have the money to do so). But if he insists on providing unlimited bandwidth to us for free indefinitely we shouldn't complain about that either. ;-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

WikiKarma The usual at [[March 20]]