Hi Lars
It's true that even my personal computer has like 4 times bigger storage than toolserver's home directory, but question is if someone ever considered if it's necessary to extend /home or quotas there. The cluster was set up in times when disk storage wasn't so big as now, and since then probably no one requested increase of quotas there. I am a very "old school" coder, and my programs, mostly written in c* languages are usually very small and eat almost no ram and disk space, so I wasn't really concerned as well, when I requested an account there that I have only 256 mb for my data (until now it's enough for me and I run 4 bots and several tools on english wikipedia). wmf and volunteers like me are now working on set up of wikimedia labs, a new virtual cluster which is more modern than toolserver, running on linux instead of solaris and has even better options for developers including more resources.
If you are interested in labs, there is an info on mediawiki in [[Wikimedia Labs]] and there will be probably soon "online conference" (probably on saturday) on labs channel on the irc dedicated to labs where you could be easily introduced to whole virtual cluster we are now working on. It's already available for people, but only limited number of services is working right now, and a lot of stuff needs to be properly configured. However I must say that labs is a perfect environment for any developer which offers more than just larger /home directory ;-)
On Wed, Feb 8, 2012 at 3:08 PM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
In December I wrote a cron job on the German toolserver, to collect statistics on external links. It works fine, but to be useful I must collect data over time, so I made a cron job to run each Monday morning.
While my attention was elsewhere, believing that this was running, it turns out the 256 Mbyte quota (!) made all my files 0 bytes in length for all of January. I have now requested and gotten an increased quota, but 6 weeks of data have been lost. And I must devote time to check my quota every week or two.
The /home disk is 600 GB of which 88 GB is free. That's not per user, but for all users together. It should come as a surprise to most people who donate money to the Wikimedia Foundation, that all of its volunteer developers have to share a disk the size of what is found in any laptop. According to an IRC discussion, some new disks that were planned to arrive in mid January have not yet been delivered. I have no idea what amount of disk has been ordered, or whether the quota system will be kept. I get the impression that this doesn't really matter to anybody.
This is the development system for the world's 6th most visited website in 2012. It quite doesn't live up to my expectations. It feels more like some hobby project in 2002. I'm a great fan of hobby projects, but with the current budget of WMDE and WMF, I thought we would have reached a higher ambition level by now.
-- Lars Aronsson (lars@aronsson.se) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se
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