[Foundation-l] Re: Information flow
Tim Starling
t.starling at physics.unimelb.edu.au
Tue Aug 23 16:26:09 UTC 2005
Lars Aronsson 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.
>
>
>>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.
At the time, we were using larousse, an 850 MHz P3, for our PHP
processing. You were sharing a load balanced cluster of apaches. Yes,
you were only paying $50/month for it, but it's likely you were
subsidised by their smaller customers. And we were serving 8 times as
much traffic. I really don't think you appreciate the challenge we
faced. And like Dori said, we did use profiling data to optimise the code.
References:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-September/018605.html
http://mail.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2003-October/018657.html
-- Tim Starling
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