Software report

General report
By Domas Mituzas - August 2006, extract from his report on both hardware & software from November 2005 till August 2006, originally posted to [//lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/foundation-l/2006-August/022676.html foundation-l]

There were lots of improvements in MediaWiki itself, but additionally Tim and Mark ended up in Squid authors list - changes made in its code were critical to proper squid performance. We did split database cluster, with English Wikipedia ending up on separate set of boxes. Some of old database servers got their new life being slaves just of few languages, thus compensating lack of memory or fast disk system. Additionally revision storage was moved from our core database boxes to 'external storage clusters', which are our application servers utilizing their idle disks.

In optimization work multiple factors are being worked on. "Make it faster" means not only having more requests per second served, but also reducing response times, and both issues are worked on constantly.

And of course, as always, team has been marvelous ;-) Thanks!

Release of MediaWiki 1.4


MediaWiki 1.4 became stable on March 20th, although the Wikimedia farm had been using 1.4 betas since December 2004. This means that most bugs have been fixed and developers are free to work full-time on the next release. MediaWiki 1.5 will use an improved database schema, which should greatly enhance performance. There is also some interesting new code to improve page caching: pages served to anonymous users and to logged-in users will look the same, something which is not the case in 1.4.

Jimmy Wales asks for more developers at FOSDEM
As the opening speaker at the FOSDEM 2005 conference in Brussels, Jimmy Wales appealed to the development community for support with the technical side of running Wikipedia. Analyses of these remarks were published in several places last week.