lsanger@ross.bomis.com wrote:
(4) Isn't it possible that, with a lot of traffic, the whole website will just become unusably slow because it's based on text files? I am asking out of pure ignorance and blind fear, and need to be educated on this point. If we were using a database-driven website (and adequate server bandwidth, which won't be a problem), I'm assuming this *wouldn't* be a problem.
Bomis handles roughly 500 times the traffic of wikipedia with text files. The text files are not a bottleneck. They get cached by the filesystem.
The fact that this is a cgi script, rather than a fastcgi script, is a bottleneck, but conversion from cgi to fastcgi is (nearly) trivial, and I've got that ready to go.
Also, the server running wikipedia has 512 meg of memory now, but we can quickly upgrade that to 2 gig if necessary. (And memory is frighteningly cheap these days.) Additional memory will be automatically used by the filesystem to cache frequently accessed files, etc., etc.
It's all good. My only concern is the edit locks.