[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

[Tim Starling]

Lars Aronsson wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> 
>>In 2003 the problem was lack of hardware.
> 
> 
> You were able to solve the problem by adding hardware. Whether 
> that is a victory or a failure is a matter of opinion.
> 
> 
>>We disabled every non-essential feature: just about every query 
>>page, search, even watchlists at times.
> 
> 
> Yes, blindly hacking away, disabling useful functions at random, 
> instead of analyzing where the bottlenecks were.  It was very 
> embarrasing to watch.  The growth numbers in 2002-2003 for 
> susning.nu (which still runs on a single server) show what 
> software optimization can do, should you have chosen that path.

At the time, we were using larousse, an 850 MHz P3, for our PHP
processing. You were sharing a load balanced cluster of apaches. Yes,
you were only paying $50/month for it, but it's likely you were
subsidised by their smaller customers. And we were serving 8 times as
much traffic. I really don't think you appreciate the challenge we
faced. And like Dori said, we did use profiling data to optimise the code.

References:

http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018605.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-October/018657.html

-- Tim Starling