On 23 Jan 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-23 at 22:06, koyaanisqatsi@nupedia.com wrote:
I wonder about the server now, though: wikipedia seems to be down; it won't bring up Recent Changes in a new window and the edit window I have open is hung on perpetually "loading." Are we being slashdotted again (more heavily!) or is there some other cause?
I tried lifting the ban on updating view counters and the slow special pages and load ballooned up like a, well, a balloon. I put it back.
Part of the problem might be MySQL. It is very fast for applications that are entirely static, however, when the data are being changed, it is quite slow. In particular, MySQL scales very poorly to multiple users trying to simultaneously update the database. I see from the statistics that the typical Wikipedia page is read only 4 or 5 times for each time it is updated. For such a use profile, PostgreSQL is likely to offer better performance. Of course, the only benchmark that counts is the application at hand. Has anyone tried Wikipedia on PostgreSQL?
Apologies if I've strayed off topic, M Carling