Archive:Hardware and hosting report/Archives 2004

From Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki

Q4 Report

Technical Development

Purchases

Donations from July and August plus money raised in late December (during and immediately following a major server crash and downtime) was used to purchase over $60,000 worth of new hardware (see [1] and [2]).

It has been an exciting year, so far, on the technical side. We started with two servers in California and an Alexa traffic rank of 900 [3]. In February, the site moved to Tampa, Florida and added nine new servers. Three more servers entered service in early June and a fourth fast and sexy database server, Ariel, followed at the end of the month. After each upgrade, the number of people using the site rose to fill the available capacity of the new servers. As of the start of September, eight more web servers are in service, with special search and file servers are awaiting installation.

As of September, Wikipedia.org routinely ranks consistently in the top 500 English language sites in Alexa's traffic rankings [4], and is steadily increasing its reach. In June we saw nearly a million edits. So far, we have avoided the sluggish performance experienced at the end of 2003. Thanks to those whose donations have made it possible to keep up.

May saw the introduction of version 1.3 of the MediaWiki software, with improved templates, categories, a new site skin, and improved language support. Edit conflict handling was also improved significantly with automated merging when using section editing. Version 1.4, due in a few months, will include better database load balancing, speed improvements, preliminary support for PostgreSQL as a database engine, and tools to help with article reviewing.

Entering service soon will be the first Wikimedia hardware outside the United States - a set of three servers acting as a Squid cache in Paris. This will serve pages to users in parts of Europe, so they will not need to wait for pages to come from Florida. Once the cache is working well, we expect to do the same in other places, as offers of hosting allow.

The new developer committee illustrates the international nature of the technical team, with members from six countries, who will be working to keep up with the continued growth of our projects.