Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)

[Daniel Mayer]

--- Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> It might at some point pay to look at selling some of the older servers
> to buy newer ones.  This would have two benefits:
> 
> 1. we are now exclusively buying dual-opterons for apache webserving,
> these are significantly more powerful _in the same physical space_ than
> our single-pentiums -- therefore, we can save a lot of rack space at the
> colo by replacing.  (This space is not especially expensive, though, in
> the grand scheme of things.)
> 
> 2.  In addition to saving physical space, there is a fair amount of dev
> time which goes into working with 124 servers (the current count, I
> believe, except not all of them are installed just now) which could be
> reduced if we were running on half the number of servers.  Wikipedia
> traffic is growing faster than Moore's Law, but even so, Moore's Law
> should make it possible for us to do more with fewer boxes.
> 
> The first benefit can be quantified, the second cannot.  (How much money
> should we be willing to spend to save the developers some time?  My
> answer is: a LOT.  Developer time is not free to us, it is infinitely
> expensive.  What I mean by that is that it is a lot more cost effective
> to have volunteer devs working in a well-funded and exciting environment
> where they can play with cutting-edge technology, than it is to
> eventually be forced to hire devs to work with boring and annoying old
> hardware.)
> 
> ----
> 
> My suspicion is that by the time we are seriously ready to get rid of
> some old machines, they will have minimal market value.   Dunno.

If that is the case, then we could donate the machines to other free
content/software projects that are still much, much smaller than us. 

-- mav 


	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com