U N S C A L A B L E period.
Scalability happens, when performance grows in linear mode with hardware and even uses some synergy. This is one of mediawiki performance development goals. Make it distributed as much as possible. Make it as async as possible. Taming cheap horsepower is a challenge, but it helps project to work on low budget. There are guys in this project working with large systems, who are really skilled system administrators (though, maybe not second-generation ones :), and who know meanings of 9's after comma. Sure, you've got possibility to brainstorm and bring all kinds of ideas, but we aware, that those won't be accepted as absolute truth. People do not need prophets when critical thought is involved :) Though, any contribution to development is here highly appreciated.
Cheers, Domas
On Fri, 18 Mar 2005 10:30:52 +0200, Domas Mituzas Domas.Mituzas@microlink.lt wrote:
Scalability happens, when performance grows in linear mode with hardware and even uses some synergy. This is one of mediawiki performance development goals. Make it distributed as much as possible. Make it as async as possible.
I think the big lynchpin right now is the fact that we have one master database. I don't know how we get from here to dual (or more) master databases. I think we also have a disk deficiency. Things like PDU's are easy to fix, and I think jwales/chaper are already on that.
Taming cheap horsepower is a challenge, but it helps project to work on low
The last installation I worked had thousands (many thousands) of dual 1.3ghz p3's, and we did just fine. Taming cheap horsepower is a challenge, but not an insurmountable one. It takes infrastructure and a little bit of work.
ones :), and who know meanings of 9's after comma. Sure, you've got possibility to brainstorm and bring all kinds of ideas, but we aware, that those won't be accepted as absolute truth. People do not need prophets when critical thought is involved :) Though, any contribution to development is here highly appreciated.
Things I say are clearly not being accepted as absolute truth. I expected as much. I did not expect the personal attacks and name-calling.
What I most want to address is these things:
* Why are we having outages? -- When I say outage, I mean people popping up in #mediawiki or #wikipedia and saying "wikislow" or "wikidown". It seems that we actually have a system that is working for now, but there are a few magic bullets that seem to sneak into the system from time to time and cause utter havoc for the developers, or if you want to be honest about it, the SA's and DBA's.
* What can we do to streamline or otherwise improve the performance of the project? -- The "fancruft" thing has been nagging at me since David started attacking me on it. I really don't care what kind of article it is, but would it be possible to create "clusters" of articles (represented in the database as such) to make it easier for the database engine to find what it wants? I'll continue these thoughts in reply to David's message.
alex
Alex J. Avriette wrote:
- What can we do to streamline or otherwise improve the performance of
the project? -- The "fancruft" thing has been nagging at me since David started attacking me on it. I really don't care what kind of article it is, but would it be possible to create "clusters" of articles (represented in the database as such) to make it easier for the database engine to find what it wants? I'll continue these thoughts in reply to David's message.
Actually, the developers have repeatedly stated that article numbers are not a concern (as I'm sure you must have been told already). This is not because there is no performance hit but because the performance hit is negligible.
I do strongly approve of merging small articles, however. I would not support a stand-alone school article, however, but I would support merging it with the relevant article on its locality. When there's enough information on it, it can be broken out into its own article. I won't go into philosophical reasons here since this is Wikitech-l, after all, but I do agree with the stance that small articles should be moved. I just think a point or two behind your reasoning is faulty. ;-)
John Lee ([[en:User:Johnleemk]])
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org