Our exponentially increasing costs (was Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Answers.com and Wikimedia Foundation to Form New Partnership)
Daniel Mayer
maveric149 at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 26 11:58:17 UTC 2005
--- 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
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