[WikiEN-l] Thankyou to all the developers.

[Robin Shannon]

The following are two emails from the wikitech-l list. Every time you
edit, say a little prayer of thanks for the devs who make it all
possible.

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:38:25 +1100, Tim Starling
<t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au> wrote:
> I said on the village pump that I thought we are doing a great job, but
> I don't think any of the developers I was aiming that comment at read
> it. Let me take this opportunity to thank everyone and recognise what we
> have acheived.
> 
> We've been working in adverse circumstances. During peak times, the site
> has been extremely heavily loaded and unstable. Any slight error in
> misconfiguration, or inaction at a particular time when action should
> have been taken, causes the site to crash. I've lost count of how many
> problems we've identified and fixed just over the last few weeks.
> 
> Many users say "the developers are doing a great job", or "we all know
> that the developers are very busy", but the fact is that 99% of users
> don't have a clue what we are doing. They don't know what our
> achievements have been and they don't know the challenges we face.
> Gerard's comments are certainly refreshing in this regard, but I think I
> can add to them. Assume I am speaking on behalf of the users, since I'm
> sure every user would agree with me if they only knew who to thank.
> 
> Big thanks go to JamesDay, who almost single-handedly administers 8
> database servers, a task requiring constant monitoring and work on the
> order of hours per day. James's advice to the MediaWiki developers and
> other system administrators is invaluable.
> 
> Also on the topic of database administration, Kate's servmon and
> WikiServices bots which have kept the site running when otherwise it
> would have been choked with long-running queries.
> 
> Thanks to Med and Submarine for their work in network and hardware
> administration of the Paris squids. Well done Mark and Kate for getting
> PowerDNS up and running and thus getting the Paris squids into service.
> 
> Domas's setproctitle() patch is amazing and we all know it. Of course
> his other system administration and development work is greatly appreciated.
> 
> Thanks to Brion, JeLuF and Hashar for their tireless and usually
> unrecognised work in fixing MediaWiki bugs.
> 
> Thanks to Kate for setting up Pen and Perlbal. This is the third time
> I'm thanking Kate and that's no coincidence - if she left us we'd be
> left with a dozen pieces of software that no-one else knows how to use.
> 
> I know you're all stressed, all we seem to get is complaints despite
> what we've acheived. I decided after Caroline Ewen's post on wikipedia-l
> that I can't afford to answer every single question asking "why is the
> site slow" or every report of "I'm getting backtrace errors!" The fact
> is that the site has grown to such a size that every time something goes
> wrong, we can expect a flood of complaints and queries. My advice would
> be to answer only some of them, and let alert users distribute the
> information to everyone who asks. Or just ignore them -- remember your
> time is valuable. Think of what you could have achieved in the time it
> took you to put a single user out of their ignorance.
> 
> When the public forums are too noisy with uninformed speculation, let's
> organise what we need to make the site better in less visible, more
> constructive forums, and work with the Board to make it happen.
> 
> -- Tim Starling

and

On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 11:41:15 +0000, Neil Harris
<usenet at tonal.clara.co.uk> wrote:
> Just to take this a bit further. I thought I'd compare Wikipedia with
> one of the "well-run sites" that we are supposed to be competing with.
> Google is a good direct comparison, because of its dynamic content, with
> cachable frequent queries.
> 
> Looking at the difference in traffic between Google and Wikipedia on
> Alexa shows that:
> * Wikipedia has 300 page views per million
> * Google has 16,000 page views per million
> Thus, Google serves roughly 53 times the number of page views compared
> to Wikipedia.
> 
> However,
> * Wikipedia currently has 39 servers
> * Google has an estimated 50,000 - 100,000 servers in its worldwide farm
> of clusters
> Thus, Google has roughly 1250 - 2500 times as many servers as Wikipedia
>  [Source: http://www.tnl.net/blog/entry/How_many_Google_machines for an
> estimate for April last year, and allowing for more recent expenditure]
> 
> Thus, we might regard Wikipedia as being roughly 24 to 48 times more
> "efficient" in its use of hardware than Google. Given that Google has
> spent over $250M on hardware, to obtain reasonable parity for our
> developers to be expected to compete with Google at our current traffic
> we should have around 1000 - 2000 high-performance servers, at a cost of
> several million US$.
> 
> So, a reasonable answer to critics seems to be:
> * the developers are already doing very well indeed coping with the
> combination of extremely high demand and very limited resources
> * they already know there are big growth and capacity problems, and are
> working hard on scalability and reliability
> * send money, rather than complaining
> 
> -- Neil

Remember boys and girls there would be no Wikimedia without Mediawiki.

paz y amor,
[[User:The bellman]]

-- 
hit me: robin.shannon.id.au
jab me: saudade at jabber.zim.net.au

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