[WikiEN-l] It's all about the Pentiums Baby! (was RE: can non-English Wikipedias move to another server?)

[Daniel Mayer]

>Is there any way that non-English Wikipedias could be
>on a seperate server than the English one, so we
>wouldn't have to feel the effects of the massive
>English-language traffic killing us?
>
>Chuck

But the current slowdown was caused by a fr.wiki sysop running a, uh, less 
than optimized sql command. ;-) If there were such a separation then only 
en.wiki would have been up during that time and we would probably have a 
flood of angry emails in a variety of languages complaining about being 
"singled-out". It is far better to keep the databases together, have the 
webserver on its own powerful box, and then have the mailing lists on a 
cheapo 500 MHz Linux box (which I can borg together and donate if needed - 
but I'm sure somebody else could donate an even better box). 

Another server is going to be up soon but this is only a short term solution 
given how fast we are growing. Mid to long term we need to set-up the 
Wikimedia Foundation so that we'll have a legal entity to accept 
tax-deductable donations and receive grants. 

Then we can start to build a really fast server cluster with 1GB Ethernet and 
if needed even start to pay Jimbo his cost for bandwidth. I hear bandwidth is 
pretty cheap for ISPs who buy it in bulk (like Jimbo) but is kinda expensive 
for ISP customers - the last thing we want is to be just another ISP customer 
so we shouldn't expect Jimbo to pay all our bills in full forever (we need to 
prevent taking Jimbo for granted - paying him back his monthly out-of-pocket 
cost only seems fair once we have the money to do so). But if he insists on 
providing unlimited bandwidth to us for free indefinitely we shouldn't 
complain about that either. ;-)

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)  

WikiKarma
The usual at [[March 20]]