Any counter-opinions out there?
Seems sensible to me. But I am more optimistic about the possibility of
using hardware to improve our performance.
I think we should aim for a dedicated database server with this
configuration:
A dual CPU box maxed out with memory, whatever drive we have for the OS,
logs, and everything but the database, and the fastest drive we can
afford housing just the DB files.
We should then have a PHP front end server with all language wiki's
installed:
This should have enough memory to keep us from paging all the time, and
some CPU horsepower would be nice.
If we can get a new machine, I would say get another server to use as a
second database server. We could then make one server the home of the
English wiki's DB, and the other the home of all the international
wiki's DBs -- this would put about 150,000 articles on each database
server.
I think further performance enhancements could be found by getting a
third database server handle read-only copies of all the DB's server, to
use for full text searches, user generated sql queries and the like.
--Mark Christensen