[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow

Tue Aug 23 12:48:46 UTC 2005

On 8/23/05, Lars Aronsson <lars at aronsson.se> wrote:
> Tim Starling wrote:
> > In 2003 the problem was lack of hardware.
> 
> You were able to solve the problem by adding hardware. Whether
> that is a victory or a failure is a matter of opinion.

I don't think you realise Wikimedia's popularity.

http://www.alexa.com/data/details/traffic_details?&range=2y&size=large&compare_sites=wikipedia.org&y=t&url=susning.nu

I'm pretty sure that Wikipedia has more features than that site in
addition to receiving a couple of magnitudes more traffic.

> 
> > We disabled every non-essential feature: just about every query
> > page, search, even watchlists at times.
> 
> Yes, blindly hacking away, disabling useful functions at random,
> instead of analyzing where the bottlenecks were.  It was very
> embarrasing to watch.  The growth numbers in 2002-2003 for
> susning.nu (which still runs on a single server) show what
> software optimization can do, should you have chosen that path.

I can't speak for the devs, but I know full well that they were doing
profiling and still are. I think you should be more respective until
you know what actually goes on.