Talk:Hardware capacity growth planning

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Quote:

Single P4 CPU around 2.4-3.0GHz (we don't care about AMD/Intel)

A P4 is shorthand for Pentium IV, an Intel chip. You mean you don't care which brand of processor you go for, right?

The servers've been getting confused and locked lately. Maybe ye should consider converting to Xserve? Lysdexia 21:03, 26 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Maintenance[edit]

The Maintance pages are mostly down. this becease some (database) overload. can we get some hardware to fix it?

IP-telephony[edit]

Try skype, it is cheap, it works well, you can have conference calls (up to 5 concurrent) and/or live IM chats (no headset needed), the only thing you need is a head-set. GerardM 05:18, 5 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Also a possibility: Evaluate some form of peer-to-peer architecture for some needed functionality a la the Skype model since the resources grow with the number of users. frankatca 8:00EST 18 Feb 2005

SAN technology en platforms[edit]

With the growth rates we are experiencing, it it in my opinion a good time to look into heavy duty SAN's We need something that really scales and, our current harddrives within a PC chassis do obviously not scale. With state of the art SAN technology, we have the option of using state of the art back-up technology. Because with the current backups to a local harddrive there is not much of a comeback after a fire in the computerroom.

One other question about hardware, is our mediawiki software totally committed to the x86 platform ?? There is hardware that has more umph than this platform and also runs Linux. GerardM 09:36, 8 Jan 2005 (UTC)

Software optimization[edit]

Month for month are new servers bought and its never enough.

I'm keep asking myself why you aren't writing an Apache module for the parsing of the Wiki-Code (and only the Wiki-Code, not the rest of the site)? This would perhaps avoid some of the overhead from the PHP parsing.

--Ingo

Update needed[edit]

There's a new fundraising drive which is citing this page, but it's apparently not updated to reflect the hardware that was purchased last time around. I think it would be a more effective fundraising tool if it had current information. Personally, I'm curious to know exactly how many servers are needed in the next few months, or how long it will be before the load increases catch up with current assets. -- Beland

Seconded. Dan100 12:30, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)


Learn from Google.[edit]

Guys (and girls)

Make net of smaller cheeper medium desktop class pc's.

Then: 1) Wiki hardware would be cheeper. 2) Becouse system would be on many computers one crash could be quickly repaired and system would be error tolerant.

3) People could donate theirs pc parts: Hard disks, proccessors, ram etc.

I hope you do that.

That Google uses ordinary PCs is an urban legend (albeit a very popular one). Like everyone else that operates huge datacenters, they use rackservers just as Wikimedia does. Maintaining inhomogenous servers made from people's old parts can become a nightmare. --Echoray 15:44, 18 Feb 2005 (UTC)

How true, Google has no home grown PC's (NATA, NONE, ZILCH, ZERO). Actually it's very cool what they do, the PC's do not have HD but boot of a network. They're a lot smaller then normal rack mounted machines cause they contain less parts also use less amps (very crucial when hosting lots of machines). There is also a TON of them per site. They have these rooms in hundreds of locals, really impressive stuff...I guess when you serve 54 Billion searches a month you need to get creative and that's not including there Content Match system.