Hello, If I think positive, I have the hope that we can move relatively shortly the 20% of tools to labs that are producing 80% of our load. So than we should come back in a stable situation on toolserver with acceptabel performance. This "stable time" we can use than to run tools until they are obsolete or moved to labs.
For now you should analyse the system and predict what we will need in such or an other scenario. It can be that we need so or so some new database servers, some more storage or whatever. If you need place and power in the rig, replace old stuff.
In the moment it can also be helpful to be hard and kill some bots/tools with a relative bad cost-benefit-relation (Perhaps every user can also check this for it's own, because it's hard to decide from the outside.). A statistic with the loads of tools would be nice for this.
The actual situation of Toolserver is a shame for Wikimedia Germany! One actual example is the zoom-viewer[1], it's a tool that is "in production" on commons. Yesterday I want to use it, but it was unusable slow. I was so frustrated, but after months with tons of these problems on the server I feel that it makes no sense to fight against the situation, if WMDE decide to invest nothing. It's nearly impossible to develop on this server in the moment, because you get no felling for the performance of your changes in simple request can take 30sec or so. Again, only a shame!
For the long term I (as WMDE member) would support Toolserver to win flexibility and in-dependency. I learn that decisions from WMF can take months or years. Projects sponsert by WMDE (like my "Multilingual Maps"[2]) die perhaps because there is no server available.
WMDE has money and it's relatively cheap to invest money into techniques compared to pay persons in high-wages Germany. I don't believe that we lose only one donor if we spend money for a server system.
It would be nice if someone could explain me why it should be useful and secure for free knowledge to collect everything on one system. Yes, I understand the financial aspect but I also know the fire in the Library of Alexandria and the Nazi book burnings.
With more than one system in the world the developers can decide where the best environment and best support is for there work. This option will motivate all to increase the quality of service. With only one system we have to live with some decisions and also WMFlabs will become old over the years and better systems will come.
Greetings Tim alias Kolossos
[1] http://toolserver.org/~dschwen/iip/wip.php?f=Dresden-Neumarkt-Kulti-2013-04.... [2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_maps_Wikipedia_project