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

[Anthony DiPierro]

On 10/26/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> --- 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


Or to schools without internet access, with Wikipedia pre-installed. :)

By the way, I have to take issue with the statement that volunteer developer
time is infinitely expensive. At the most it's slightly less expensive than
the cost to hire someone to do the task (and c'mon, who wouldn't want to
work for Wikimedia?). Otherwise, we're doing something wrong.