[Toolserver-l] Capacity...what?

[Lars Aronsson]

When I asked in what way, if any, the Swedish chapter could help 
the toolserver project, the short answer I got was that a new 
server would cost 8000 euro and a year's salary for an admin would 
cost even more.  If we had 8000 euro to spend (we don't) and 
nobody asked us what we use the money for, maybe we could get away 
with that.  But when we ask people for donations, they like to 
know what it's good for.  So what is the toolserver good for, 
really?  I think I know this, but how can I explain it to others?

The annual report (Tätigkeitsbericht) for 2007 for Wikimedia 
Deutschland mentions that 60,000 euro was used to double squid 
capacity and 10,000 euro was used for the toolserver cluster.  
The report for 2008 should be due soon, I guess.

I think it could be useful if the toolserver project could find a 
way to explain its current capacity, what kind of services this 
capacity is used for, and how much this capacity could be 
increased by a certain donation.  We could make a little folder or 
poster that explains this, and distribute among our fans.

The easiest would perhaps be to count the HTTP requests.  How many 
requests (or page views) does the toolserver receive per year, 
day, or second?  How are they distributed over the various 
services?  Is it possible to count how many unique visitors (IP 
addresses) each service has?  Divided by language or referer 
language of Wikipedia? Could the toolserver produce something 
similar to Domas' hourly visitor statistics for Wikipedia?

There's already http://toolserver.org/%7Einteriot/cgi-bin/tstoc 
where the right-most column indicates the number of individual IP 
adresses in the last 7 days.  Is there a log of these data?  It 
must be wrong (surely?) that only 8 tools had any accesses this 
week.  It could be correct that "21933 unique IP's visited the 
toolserver this week", but that number sounds rather low.

The toolserver hopefully spends far more processor cycles for each 
HTTP request than a squid cache. But just how many more? Every 
server has an economic life of maybe 3 years, while its purchasing 
price is written off, and it serves a number of HTTP requests in 
that time.  So what is the hardware (and hosting) cost of each 
request?

Of course, HTTP requests is not everything.  Is there a way we 
could measure other uses of the toolserver?

Getting back to my favorite: The geographic applications. Are the 
map tiles for the WikiMiniAtlas served from the toolserver?  How 
much power does this currently use for the Swedish Wikipedia? What 
if the maps were shown inline for every visitor, instead of as a 
pop-up that very few people click on?  How much extra would that 
cost?  Could such a service still run on the toolserver, or would 
it need to be moved to the servers in Florida?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se

  Wikimedia Sverige - stöd fri kunskap - http://wikimedia.se/