On 23 Jan 2003, Brion Vibber wrote:
On ĵaŭ, 2003-01-23 at 22:06, koyaanisqatsi(a)nupedia.com
wrote:
I wonder about the server now, though: wikipedia seems to be down; it
won't bring up Recent Changes in a new window and the edit window I
have open is hung on perpetually "loading." Are we being slashdotted
again (more heavily!) or is there some other cause?
I tried lifting the ban on updating view counters and the slow special
pages and load ballooned up like a, well, a balloon. I put it back.
Part of the problem might be MySQL. It is very fast for applications that
are entirely static, however, when the data are being changed, it is quite
slow. In particular, MySQL scales very poorly to multiple users trying to
simultaneously update the database. I see from the statistics that the
typical Wikipedia page is read only 4 or 5 times for each time it is
updated. For such a use profile, PostgreSQL is likely to offer better
performance. Of course, the only benchmark that counts is the application
at hand. Has anyone tried Wikipedia on PostgreSQL?
Apologies if I've strayed off topic,
M Carling